Grove Koger
Critics who’ve glanced at John Atkinson Grimshaw’s paintings have tended to write him off as a hard-working but not particularly exciting or talented artist. He was no revolutionary, he seldom exhibited his works publicly, and he repeated scenes and motifs, as if his vision were a limited one.
This evaluation may be true, but within his limits, within the relatively small range of subjects that he knew and paid artistic tribute to, Grimshaw excelled.
Born September 6, 1836, in Leeds in north-central England, Grimshaw began working for the Great Northern Railway, but gave it up in 1861 to devote himself to art. In time, he turned to painting urban and suburban scenes—docks and streets—as they appeared at twilight or in the moonlight or as illuminated by streetlights. These have become his best-known works, although he was also good at painting fairies, a favorite subject among the Victorians.
One of Grimshaw’s interests was photography, and he may have used an ingenious piece of equipment known as the camera obscura. This is a centuries-old device in which an image is projected (upside down) through a small hole or lens onto a surface such as a wall. In Grimshaw’s own day, the camera obscura had evolved into a box in which the image was projected onto light-sensitive material. (Sound familiar?) In any case, I’ve read that Grimshaw had a shaky grasp of perspective, so the device would have been particularly useful to him.
Fellow painter James McNeill Whistler, who shared a studio with Grimshaw for a time, famously remarked that he had considered himself “the inventor of nocturnes” until he “saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures.” In our own day, Grimshaw’s work has shown up pretty regularly on the covers of ghost story collections, and Chandos chose one of his fairy paintings for a recording of Arnold Bax’s bewitching tone poems. Such uses are certainly apropos, but when I look at Grimshaw’s docks and moonlit suburban lanes, I find myself thinking of another world entirely, of “half-deserted streets” and of the “yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes” and goes on to lick “its tongue into the corners of the evening.” Those are the words of modernist poet T.S. Eliot, who was born five years before Grimshaw died but who seems to have shared his own conceptual studio with the “old-fashioned” painter.
The images in today’s post are, top to bottom, Glasgow, Saturday Night; portrait of Grimshaw in his thirties by an unknown photographer; Ships on the Clyde; In the Golden Olden Times; and, on the Bax recording, Autumn—”Dame Autumn Hath a Mournful Face”—Old Ballad.
If you’ve enjoyed today’s post, please share!
World Enough 