John Atkinson Grimshaw - Twilight

Price Realized £91,250

signed 'Atkinson Grimshaw/1869+' (lower right)
oil on board laid down on canvas
15 1/2 x 21 1/2 in. (39.3 x 54.6 cm.)

John Atkinson Grimshaw - Twilight

Price Realized £91,250

signed 'Atkinson Grimshaw/1869+' (lower right)
oil on board laid down on canvas
15 1/2 x 21 1/2 in. (39.3 x 54.6 cm.)

John Atkinson Grimshaw - An Autumn Lane

signed and dated l.r.: Atkinson Grimshaw 1886+
oil on canvas
76 by 64cm., 30 by 25in

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, John Atkinson Grimshaw painted a series of views of deserted suburban streets in London and Yorkshire. These images of a solitary female figure, making her way down a leaf and puddle strewn road, are perhaps the most emotive and typical of the artist, who was unrivalled in his depiction of the evening
gloaming and the dawning morn. Whether he was painting suburban roads, the docks at Whitby and Liverpool or the shopping streets of Leeds; busy and noisy places during the day, Grimshaw painted the silent solitary evening still, when the residents, dock-workers and shop assistants return home, leaving the streets deserted. The horses and carts, which have left their impressions in the damp soil of the road, have long since departed and the gateways have been closed to the outside world. There is an emotive sense of stillness and calm which pervades these golden images of evening light.

An Autumn Lane depicts the same view with the same house, but lit by the glow of the dawn, rather than the moonlit sky. The view has not been identified and it has been suggested that it is an amalgam of views in North Yorkshire, rather than a specific identifiable location. As Alexander Robinson states, 'Just as myth and legend were
to be plundered for subjects, so actual and historical houses could be put together to form an archetypical mansion'.

However the same house appears in many pictures by the artist and it is likely that it did exist, probably in one of the suburbs of Leeds, where the artist often painted. The house features prominently in A Yorkshire House' of 1878 (Harrogate Museums and Art Gallery), A Golden Idyll (sold in these rooms, 12 December 1997, lot 181), Gold of Autumn (sold in these rooms, 6 November 1995, lot 199), An Autumn Lane and related pictures. These series of pictures recall the lines of Lord Alfred Tennyson's Enoch Arden;

'The small house,
The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes,
The peacock-yew tree and the lonely Hall...
The chill November dawns and dewy-glooming downs,
The gentle shower, the smell of the dying leaves...'

In 1885 Grimshaw had temporarily entered London society, moving firstly into a hotel on The Strand and later to a studio on Manresa Road in Chelsea. It is possible that it was in Chelsea that he painted An Autumn Lane and it is tempting to speculate that the scene is at least partly based on one of the streets of Chelsea or Battersea, which were lined with mansions surrounded by high walls and with rows of looming birch and plane trees. However, the house itself was almost certainly based upon the artist's studies made earlier in the 1880s in Yorkshire. Around the
time this picture was painted, Grimshaw was a good friend of the other great Victorian painter of noctures, James Abbot McNeill Whistler, who lived a short walk across Chelsea Bridge. Whistler greatly admired Grimshaw's moonlit scenes and there was a genuine admiration between the two artists.

Although Grimshaw was inspired by the modernism of industrial dockyards and the lamplit city commercialism, he was also a great admirer of the crumbling heritage of England, with a deep love for Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture. Amongst the items which remained in his estate when he died, were a handful of his most precious
books, including A History of Hardwick Hall of 1835. Grimshaw painted many street scenes in which beautiful ancient houses stand hauntingly silent, bathed in the golden dawn light and surrounded by birch trees stripped bare by the approaching winter.

Painted with a limited palette of malachite, gold and russet, with a meticulous attention to detail, Grimshaw created an image which is powerfully romantic and yet wholly realistic. This picture is a radiant painting by Grimshaw in which his characteristic verdegris night sky is replaced by a wonderfully luminous morning glow. An Autumn Lane is one of Grimshaw's most important canvases of the series.

John Atkinson Grimshaw - Hull Docks at Night

signed l.r.: Atkinson Grimshaw
oil on canvas
61 by 92cm., 24 by 36in.

Lot Sold. Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 241,250 GBP


The work of Atkinson Grimshaw is valuable and unique in several respects. He made a great popular success out of that amalgam of Pre-Raphaelite sentiment, nature and industry that dominated the culture of northern England in the later nineteenth century. His work is our only visual equivalent to the great epics of industrial change, the novels of Gaskell and Dickens.' (David Bromfield, Atkinson Grimshaw 1836-1893, exhibition catalogue, 1979-1980, p. 5)

John Atkinson Grimshaw celebrated the age of industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth in a series of paintings in which moonlight and lamplight contrast with one another and skeletal trees or ship's rigging are interchangeable. In the present picture of the docks at Hull with the sailed-barges and steamers, horse-drawn hansoms make their way along the wet cobbled road which reflects the gaslight of the shop windows that face the dock. A young woman and her child are hurrying across the road whilst on the opposite pavement another woman stops to talk to an organ-grinder silhouetted against the glow of a street-lamp. Bromfield has interpreted Grimshaw's port scenes as 'icons of commerce and the city. They are remarkable in that they record the contemporary port's role within Victorian life; they appealed directly to Victorian pride and energy.

They also show that same darkness, a mysterious lack of complete experience of the subject which one associates with large cities and big business, which Dickens recounts so well in Bleak House and Great Expectations and for which Grimshaw's moonlight became a perfect metaphor.' (ibid Bromfield, p. 15). The number of ships-masts visible in the present picture demonstrates how busy Hull's docks were in the late nineteenth century when it was one of the busiest ports in the country. The imposing three-domed building in the present picture was the Dock Offices (it now houses Hull Maritime Museum), the headquarters of the Hull Dock Company in Queen Victoria Square. This magnificent example of Victorian architecture was built in 1871 and was relatively new when it was painted by Grimshaw which demonstrates the modernity of his cityscapes. The monument to the left is that of William Wilberforce, the Yorkshire MP and anti-slavery campaigner. The monument, built in 1834 comprised a ninety foot Doric column upon which stood a twelve foot statue of Wilberforce. It stood for almost a hundred years at the edge of Princes Dock until the 1930s when the dock was closed and the monument was moved. On the left of the
composition, behind the skeletal rigging of the sail ships is the silhouette of St John's Church, now demolished.

Another picture of Princes Docks dated 1882 is in the collection of the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull whilst another version was sold in these rooms (17 December 2009, lot 51).

Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight

Hard times: The Victorian artist who mastered the night but was overshadowed by debt

Today his oil paintings fetch up to £500,000 but a new exhibition reveals how Victorian master John Atkinson Grimshaw's artistic ambitions left him destitute.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378068/John-Atkinson-Grimshaw-The-Victorian-artist-mastered-night-shadowed-debt.html#ixzz1JyfpTwx5

John Atkinson Grimshaw - A Wintry Moon

signed and dated l.r.: 1886+ / Atkinson Grimshaw, signed, inscribed and dated on verso A Wintry Moon, Atkinson Grimshaw,/1886+

oil on canvas

Lot Sold. Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 201,600 GBP

77 by 63 1/2 cm., 30 1/4 by 25 in


John Atkinson Grimshaw had a middle class upbringing in Leeds. As a young man he worked as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway, painting in his spare time. Despite disapproval from his family (apparently his mother threw his paints into the fire), Grimshaw gave up his job in about 1861 in order to pursue a career as an artist. He met success quickly. He was an ambition artist who managed to be prolific whilst maintaining the attention to detail for which he is so admired. In 1862 he exhibited six paintings at the prestigious Philosophical Hall in Leeds, alongside works by Pre-Raphaelite artists such as William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the early years of his career he painted still lives and figure scenes as well as brightly lit landscapes. He mixed in artistic social circles with eminent literary figures and was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and Tissot as well drawing inspiration from Victorian writers and poets. Grimshaw’s work reveals his love of drama and romance and his paintings often evoke the atmosphere of Victorian literature. Grimshaw particularly admired Tennyson and gave some of his fifteen children (only six survived) Medieval names such as Arthur and Lancelot after the characters in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. In 1874 he exhibited at the Royal Academy and his success at this time was so great the he was able to buy a second house in Scarborough, in addition to his home just outside Leeds.

The period of the 1880’s, from which this picture dates, was Grimshaw’s most prolific era and marks the stage when Grimshaw adopted the moonlight genre for which he is now renowned. In A Wintry Moon Grimshaw has captured a moonlit night in the suburbs as a man drives his horse and cart down the road. Our eyes follow the road round the corner and along to the houses with smoking chimneys at the end. The glowing warm light in the windows of the Victorian house in the foreground suggest the warmth and comfort of the house interior which contrasts with and the cold, damp and dark night. Thus Grimshaw creates an atmoshperic scene which combines the elegance of the trees, the grandeur of the buildings at night with a reflective quiet mood.

John Atkinson Grimshaw - The Trysting Tree

Lot Sold. Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 232,000 GBP

35.5 by 45 cm., 14 by 17 ¾ in
signed l.r.: Atkinson Grimshaw 1881; inscribed with the title, signed and dated on the reverse: The trysting tree / Atkinson Grimshaw / 1881

oil on panel

John Atkinson Grimshaw - Whitby Sands, sunset

Price Realized £57,575

signed and dated 'Atkinson Grinshaw/1867+' (lower left), signed and dated again 'ATKINSON GRIMSHAW/1867' (lower right), and further signed and inscribed 'Whitby Sands./Sunset. Sep:/Atkinson Grimshaw' (on the reverse) and with inscription 'Whitby Sands/Sunset Sep/Atkinson Grimshaw' (on the backboard)
pencil, watercolour and bodycolour with gum arabic
10½ x 16 in. (26.6 x 40.6 cm.)

The present watercolour is a remarkably rare example of Grimshaw's work in watercolour, a medium that he used in an important experimental phase in his development but confined to the 1860s. There are no other known seascapes in this medium.

The photographic appearance of the watercolour reflects Grimshaw's keen interest in photography. It was not until late in 1890-93 that he became a member of the Leeds Photographic Society. In the 1860s Grimshaw was very influenced by John Ruskin and the critic's strict rules regarding visual accuracy also encouraged the use of photographs as a source for painting. The unusual light effects in some of the works produced by Grimshaw using photographs are a result of using more than one photographic source for a composition.

The patterns on the wet sand are particularly photographic in appearance and the hard lines and shadows are similar to those in the rocks in the foreground of The Vale of Newlands, Cumberland, dated 1868, sold Christie's London, 11 July 1972 (800 gns.).

It was in 1867 that Atkinson Grimshaw painted his first moonlight scene, Whitby Harbour by Moonlight. Another watercolour of Whitby by Grimshaw dated 1868 is in the Pannett Art Gallery Whitby (see Atkinson Grimshaw, Leeds, 1979, op.cit., pl. 22).