John Atkinson Grimshaw - Silver Moonlight

Kirklees Museums and Galleries

John Atkinson Grimshaw - Night Scene, Rouen

Kirklees Museums and Galleries

John Atkinson Grimshaw photo

John Atkinson Grimshaw - London Bridge at Half Tide

John Atkinson Grimshaw - Whitby Harbor

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