In a review of Floating Cities for the San Francisco Chronicle (February 16, 1992), Kenneth Baker observed: “The accuracy of proportion and perspective in Stephen Wiltshire’s ink drawings – not to mention their detail – is amazing. For all their busyness, Stephen Wiltshire’s drawings are not snarled with obsessive rhythms. He obviously takes pleasure in what he can see and record, and his technique, though consistent, is admirably adapted to specific subjects… Whatever barriers to conventional life Wiltshire’s condition [has] put in his path, his eye and hand are enviably open channels.” David Gritten wrote for the Los Angeles Times (February 5, 1992), “[The book] illustrates Stephen Wiltshire’s ability to capture not only a building’s detail; he has an innate sense of perspective and also can convey the mood a building evokes. Thus his Kremlin Palace in Moscow looks forbidding and imposing; his St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square with its multicolored cluster of onion domes, seems to spring from a fantasy.” Floating Cities reached the top spot on the (London) Sunday Times nonfiction bestseller list.
In 1992 Stephen accepted the invitation of a Tokyo-based television company to tour Japan and make drawings of various landmark structures, including the Tokyo metropolitan government building, in Shinjuku, and the Ginza shopping district. He then traveled to America once again, a trip that resulted in the book American Dream (1993), which featured cityscapes of Chicago, San Francisco, and New York, as well as the desert landscape of Arizona. Mary Ambrose wrote for the Montreal Gazette (July 31, 1993), “His paintings of the Arizona desert [establish] him as more than a one-trick pony, and although the coloring is a bit rough, his strong natural sense of composition keeps it together.” Stephen also included depictions of friends and acquaintances, and some observers took the presence of human figures in his work as a sign that he was developing socially.
While his teachers had long known that Stephen Wiltshire liked to sing, the extent of his musical talent was not immediately apparent. Hewson told Anne Barrowclough for the London Daily Mail (September 14, 1993) that she discovered the artist’s additional skill while on the trip to Russia: “When we were in Moscow we would throw our own private concerts, usually opera, in our hotel room. One evening Stephen stood on a chair and sang Carmen from memory. He had picked it up from the television and remembered it almost perfectly.” He soon began studying with the music teacher Evelyn Preston, who identified Stephen as having perfect pitch – the rare ability to identify the pitch of an isolated musical note.
