Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

signed Atkinson Grimshaw (lower right); signed and inscribed A golden beam./ Atkinson Grimshaw (on reverse)

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Sale, Christie's, London, June 12, 2001, lot 32, illustrated

CATALOGUE NOTE

Atkinson Grimshaw's A Golden Beam is painted in the artist's mature style, which he favored throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Suffused with golden light, the air heavy with warm sunshine, A Golden Beam is perfectly evocative of fall afternoons spent walking in crisp air over crackling leaves. The woman walking seems lonely; Grimshaw turns her face from us, making her solitude complete. The sadness emanating from the picture is well balanced by a sense of reflective calm.

Born and raised in Leeds, a wealthy industrial town in Northern England, Grimshaw was not encouraged by his working class family towards a career in art. But Leeds was a town filled with active galleries that held frequent exhibitions, and Grimshaw was exposed early on to the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Their precise method of recording nature entranced Grimshaw and his early works were heavily influenced by this early exposure to his groundbreaking contemporaries. In fact, the artist started his career by making diminutive nature studies, taking his subjects from the woods outside his home in Leeds.

This early influence never completely faded, and in Grimshaw's autumn works such as A Golden Beam, this attention to detail is evident in the lacelike branches of the trees, the mottled stone walls, the tall, empty windows of the dreamlike manor hall, and the quality of the light as it reflects against these different surfaces. As an artist, Grimshaw made use of much of the contemporary artistic production around him, and was deeply affected by the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson, whose verses he often inscribed on the backs of his canvases. The moody melancholic lines, often keening for earlier, simpler days, are well suited to the misty views and mysterious women who populate Grimshaw's empty suburban lanes.