John Atkinson Grimshaw

John Atkinson Grimshaw was an English painter of the Victorian era, born in Leeds in 1836, who made the night his subject. His typical picture is a suburban lane or a harbor at dusk or by moonlight: bare trees against a green-gold sky, wet cobbles reflecting lamplight, a single figure hurrying home. The critic Christopher Wood called him a "remarkable and imaginative painter," and his paintings remain among the most recognizable of the period.

Life in brief

Grimshaw was the son of a policeman and began work as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway. He had no formal artistic training. Against his parents' wishes he took up painting, and in 1861 he left the railway to paint full time. His early works were minutely detailed still lifes and landscapes in the Pre-Raphaelite manner. Success in the 1870s let him rent Knostrop Old Hall, a seventeenth-century manor outside Leeds, which appears in many of his pictures. He also kept a London studio in the 1880s, where he knew James McNeill Whistler. He died in Leeds in 1893.

Style and technique

Grimshaw's great theme was light at the edge of darkness: the last glow of sunset, moonlight through mist, the warm windows of shops seen through rain. He built up thin, smooth layers of paint and drew trees and rigging with fine, almost calligraphic precision. Contemporaries suspected that he used photographs or projected images to set out his compositions, and some criticized his surfaces as too smooth to show handling. The same smoothness gives his pictures their stillness. Whistler is reported to have said that he thought himself the inventor of the nocturne until he saw "Grimmy's" moonlit pictures.

Key works

A Yorkshire Lane in November is characteristic: a lone figure walks down a damp lane between leafless trees under a pale moon, the road shining with rain. His harbor pictures of Liverpool, Glasgow, Whitby and Scarborough and his London views of the Thames at night carry the same mood into the industrial city.

Where to see his work

Leeds Art Gallery holds an important group, and Tate in London owns Liverpool Quay by Moonlight (1887). Other works are in Harrogate, Scarborough and many regional collections. For more nocturnes, see Dark Academia.