Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893)

Aliases: John Atkinson Grimshaw

Professions: Painter

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  John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893)

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  John Atkinson Grimshaw

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  JOHN ATKINSON GRIMSHAW BRITISH, 1836-1893 A GOLDEN BEAM

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  John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893)

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Atkinson Grimshaw Biography

(b Leeds, 6 Sept 1836; d Leeds, 31 Oct 1893). English painter. He had no formal art training but learnt from examples he saw in local art shops. The greatest influence on his early work was John William Inchbold, a Pre-Raphaelite landscape painter from Leeds. Grimshaw gave up his work as a clerk on the railways to take up painting full-time in 1861. His first pictures were of dead birds, blossom and fruit studies in the manner of William Henry Hunt. He accepted Ruskin’s view of the world in his ‘truth to nature’ paintings of the woods around Adel and Meanwood in Leeds. Grimshaw’s picture A Mossy Glen (1864; Brighouse, Smith A.G.) is close to Inchbold’s technique and colour range. His first patrons were members of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. Grimshaw began to exhibit from 1862, and he showed five paintings in all at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Two works from this period show his Pre-Raphaelite interests: Nab Scar (1864; London, Christopher Wood Gal.) and the Bowder Stone, Borrowdale (c. 1864; London, Tate). Both are painted in a crisp, hard-edge manner in brilliantly fresh colours. Nab Scar is closely based on a photograph that Grimshaw used as an aide-mémoire. The culmination of this early period is Autumn Glory: The Old Mill (1869; Leeds, C.A.G.), in which all the detail of leaves, twigs, ivy and moss-covered stone is painstakingly shown. Moonlight scenes are Grimshaw’s best-known subjects. The earliest is Whitby Harbour by Moonlight (1867; priv. col., see 1979 exh. cat., pl. 42), which shows the town in full colour, bathed in moonlight. This broader technique, often featuring the mysterious atmosphere of mist-laden horizons, was particularly appreciated by middle-class clients, often northern industrialists. Grimshaw’s dock scenes of Liverpool, Hull and Glasgow, and the manor houses glimpsed down leafy, stone-walled suburban lanes, along which a single figure walks, were especially popular. The lonely houses are usually combinations of different buildings, often taken from architectural plates.

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