Nocturne and gold - paintings by John Atkinson Grimshaw

Moonlight on the Lake, Roundhay Park, Leeds. (Almost all of the paintings featured in this post were completed in the 1870s and 1880s.)

John Atkinson Grimshaw (6 September 1836, Leeds – 13 October 1893, Leeds), English Victorian-era artist. He is best known for his autumnal, sparsely populated landscape settings, his crepuscular or moonlit views of city and suburban streets and of the docks in London, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow.

The Lovers.

At the age of twenty, he married his cousin Frances Hubbard (1835–1917). Four years later, to the dismay of his parents, he left his job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway to become a painter. He first exhibited in 1862 - mostly paintings of birds, fruit, and flowers - under the patronage of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. His work would be much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, and in the 1880s Grimshaw maintained a London studio in Chelsea, not far from the studio of James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

A Moonlit Lane.

Grimshaw died of tuberculosis a month before his fifty-seventh birthday and is buried in the former Woodhouse Cemetery. He left behind no papers, letters, or journals, so there has been little material on which to base scholarship of his life and career. Several of his children - Arthur E. Grimshaw (1864–1913), Louis H. Grimshaw (1870–1944), Wilfred Grimshaw (1871–1937), and Elaine Grimshaw (1877–1970) - also became painters.

Going to Church.

Southwark Bridge from Blackfriar’s.

Evening Glow.

Evening Glow. (Detail of above.)

November Night.

The Last Gleam.

Forge Valley.

Autumn Sunshine, Stapelton Park.

November.

November. (Detail of above.)

A Golden Shower.

At the Park Gate.

In the Golden Gloaming.

A Yorkshire Lane in November.

A Manor House in Autumn.

Whitby Harbor by Moonlight.

In the Golden Glow of Autumn.

A Moonlit Lane, with Two Lovers.

The Sere and Yellow Leaf.

Moonlight, Wharfedale. Circa 1860s.

***

The artist.