john atkinson grimshaw

JOHN ATKINSON GRIMSHAW
(Leeds 1836 - Leeds 1893)
Greenock Harbour at Night
signed and dated ‘Atkinson Grimshaw 93’ (lower right);
further signed and inscribed ‘Greenock-/Atkinson Grimshaw 93’ (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
30.5 x 45.7 cm (12 x 18 in)
Provenance: with Richard Green, London.
A
hub of Victorian industrial life, the docks
at Greenock on the River Clyde were the subject of several
compositions that John Atkinson Grimshaw painted, and were
a favourite setting for his nocturnal scenes. The industrial
cities of Britain and their commercial growth were a source
of immense inspiration for Grimshaw, as he celebrated the age of industry,
commerce and conspicuous wealth in a manner which was both poetic
and deeply sensitive.
In the present work, the cobweb of the ships’ rigging is silhouetted
against the darkened sky, and a horse-drawn carriage makes its way along
the wet cobbled road. On the right-hand side of the picture, passersby
peer into the windows of a row of shops: some of which are real Greenock
shops, others fictitious enterprises created by Grimshaw and given such
aptly Scottish names as ‘Johnston’ and ‘John Campbell’. As the eye
effortlessly follows the receding lines of the buildings towards the end of
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Liverpool Quay by Moonlight, 1887,
Tate Britain, London (Figure 2)
Robert Salmon, The Custom House at Greenock, 1828,
The Metropolitan Museum, New York (Figure 1)
the street, the viewer becomes immersed in the fog and rain: conditions
which obscure the view of the dock and add a sense of atmospheric
intensity to the picture.
The building at the far end of the street with its imposing classical
architecture is Greenock Custom House. Designed by William Burn
(1789-1870) in 1818, it is considered by many to be the finest of its kind
and is now a museum. The Custom House is shown here as painted in an
earlier Georgian style by Robert Salmon (1755-c.1844) (fig. 1). The use
of a carriage or omnibus, as in Liverpool Quay by Moonlight, see figure
2, is a characteristic element in Grimshaw’s works and acts as an aide to
the viewer’s perspective along his orderly straight streets. Other common
elements present in both works include the backlighting of the ships’
masts stencilled across the skyline, which are contrasted against the warm
light from the shops and its bathing effect on the streets.
It is significant that the present work was signed in 1893, the year of
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Twilight, 1869,
Private Collection (Figure 3)
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Greenock Harbour at Night (Detail)
Grimshaw’s death, for this makes it one of his final paintings. A couple
of years prior to this, Grimshaw had shifted away from the depiction
of such classic nocturnes to re-explore the genre of daylight landscape
painting as he had done in his earlier years. Greenock Harbour at Night
is evidently a final return to form for Grimshaw, and quite possibly the
last of his works to capture the mysterious moonlit atmosphere of a
Victorian city.
The painterly methods employed by Grimshaw in the composition of
Greenock Harbour at Night therefore represent the culmination of years
of experimentation and practice with this specific subject matter, and
Grimshaw’s technical mastery of his subject is evident. His treatment of
perspective is consistent and admirably accurate throughout the work:
from the depiction of each individual cobblestone to the overall cohesion
of the numerous orthogonals which recede into the obscure distance.
However, Grimshaw’s most wonderful achievement with regards to this
work, as with many of his night paintings, is in his successful depiction
of atmosphere. To have been able to achieve the muted luminary radiance
which is palpable throughout the work, Grimshaw would have used
black underpainting for areas of tonal density - particularly around the
silhouetted forms of the ships and background shadowing - and applied
over this a coat of opaque paint to allow the re-emergence of light in
such a soft, harmonious way as we see on this canvas.¹ Having completed
the painting, Grimshaw used glazes to further saturate the shadows and
wet streets of Greenock.
In his paintings of the docks, Grimshaw created an image of a poetic
and mysterious Victorian Britain, a testimonial snapshot of a great
industrial age. Drawing on the vocabulary of Romanticism, Grimshaw’s
dock scenes were almost always depicted at night or in a fading light. In
the present work, and Liverpool Quay by Moonlight, the glow of the moon
casts its hazy light from above the painting. By setting the scene under
this faded light Grimshaw was able to show off his skill at depicting the
effects of light; here we see the glow from the shop fronts as it literally
bounces off the wet cobbles outside.
Grimshaw’s fascination with depicting night scenes follows an allure
to painting moonlight scenes during the Romantic era. Caspar David
Friedrich (1774-1840), who painted Two Men Contemplating the Moon
(1819), is perhaps one of the most well known painters of this theme.
The moon presented a magical and fantastical subject matter and was
a source of great inspiration across the arts. Frédéric Chopin (18101849) composed his Nocturnes for Piano (1827-46) and Ludwig van
Beethoven (1770-1827) his Moonlight Sonata (1801). It featured in the
poetry of Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), the autobiographical Dichtung
und Wahrheit (1811-33) of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832),
and the Hymns to the Night (1800) of the poet Novalis (1772-1801).
However, one of the most well known painters of moonlit scenes, or
‘nocturnes’, was Grimshaw’s contemporary, James Abbott McNeill
Whistler (1834-1903). Grimshaw befriended Whistler whilst in London
and it is believed that they possibly shared a studio, Whistler apparently
described Grimshaw as an inventor of ‘nocturnes’ saying: ‘I considered
myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlight
picture.’²
It has been suggested that Grimshaw’s works offer a criticism of
social division: take, for example, the over-packed omnibus alongside
a private carriage as in Liverpool Quay by Moonlight. Similarly, in
works such as Twilight, see figure 3, the natural order of the landscape
and representation of manual toil and labour in the fields could be a
reflection on the disappearance of the pastoral lifestyle to the forces of
industrialisation. The words LABOR OMNIA VINCIT on the back of
his famous Dolce Domum seem to communicate a fairly explicit message
with regards to the value of manual labour - however following his
significant artistic shift to painting the city scene by night, Grimshaw’s
message becomes less clear. When painting the grimy streets of Liverpool
in Liverpool Docks, for example, Grimshaw does not seem to be criticising
or casting aspersions on city life so much as he is romanticising. In
an almost Dickensian fashion he embraces the fog, drizzle, and dirt
of the city. And indeed, as is the case with his captivating moonlight
depictions, Grimshaw recalls the poetic and literary sources of the time
which captured the soul of the city.
Greenock, a large town in the west of Scotland, was one of Grimshaw’s
favourite sites for depicting dockside scenes. Lying on the south bank of
the River Clyde, it prospered as a port town in the eighteenth century
as the main west coast port for trade with the Americas, in particular for
valuable sugar imported from the Caribbean. By the end of the eighteenth
century, around 400 ships a year were transporting sugar from Caribbean
¹ Robertson, Alexander, Atkinson Grimshaw, (Phaidon Press, London, 1988) p. 115.
² Ibid. p.75.
holdings and to Greenock for processing in the fourteen sugar refineries
that were situated in the town. Greenock’s increasing importance and
wealth was manifested in the construction of the Italianate municipal
buildings, in particular the Victoria Tower, completed in 1886, which
stands 245 feet tall, and the town’s railway station opened in 1841. The
nineteenth-century wealth of the town was also evident in the large
villas that were built in the West End for ship owners, industrialists and
investors who thrived from the town’s industry.
Born in Leeds in 1836, Grimshaw was the son of a policeman. His
parents were strict Baptists and his mother strongly disapproved of his
interest in painting and on one occasion she destroyed all his paints. He
began working as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway in 1848 in their
Leeds office but began to concentrate on painting full time in 1861.
Grimshaw became popular in Leeds, selling his work through a
couple of small galleries and picture dealers. His growing popularity,
particularly with art collectors in the northern urban centres,
encouraged him to paint the industrial ports and harbours of Liverpool,
Hull, Scarborough, Whitby and Glasgow. Indeed, Grimshaw’s dock
scenes were in such demand that one collector in Liverpool named
Jackson told the artist that he would buy as many pictures as could
be painted. By the 1870s he was at his most successful and had rented
Knostrop Hall, a manor house in Leeds. Grimshaw used its interiors as
a backdrop and painted a series of fashionably dressed women in the
style of James Tissot and collaborated with the dealer William Agnew
to buy and sell his works in London. Until the early 1870s Grimshaw’s
paintings were predominantly still lifes, with a few landscapes of the
Leeds area. However, it is his work from the 1880s, of the towns and
docks of Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds, London, Scarborough and Whitby,
that are Grimshaw’s best known subjects.
He recreated atmospheric scenes capturing the Victorian age,
bathing his street scenes, manor houses and cityscapes in the light of
sunset or under the moonlight. Particularly crucial to understanding
Grimshaw’s technique is an awareness of the role of photography.
Grimshaw did not usually sketch or paint directly from nature, however
he did use photography throughout his career as a tool to ensure the
adherence of his paintings to nature. He expounded its virtues at a
talk called Watchwords for Workers, where the press reported that “Mr
Grimshaw insisted upon the necessity of a study of perspective by
photographers, pointing out that they had the privilege of acquiring
absolute truth of form by the God-sent art science of photography,
and he advised them to use it wisely.”³ This reliance on photography,
as seen in Blea Tarn at First Light and Langdale Pikes in the Distance,
the compositions of which have been directly taken from photographs
of Grimshaw’s, recalls the Pre-Raphaelite tradition of rendering nature
in as precise and detailed a manner as possible. The Pre-Raphaelites
relied heavily on the medium of photography, and John Ruskin (18191900) in particular spoke of how ‘amongst all the mechanical poison
that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men, it has given
us at any rate one antidote - the daguerreotype’.⁴ On the other hand,
the potential of the photograph was not overstated, and it was believed
that it should not be used as anything more than an “aide-memoire”:
that is, the artist still bore a responsibility to create rather than simply
imitate. It is not known whether a photograph was used as an aid to
the production of Greenock Harbour by Night, however the medium’s
overall influence in prompting Grimshaw to capture the minutiae of
the scene with such delicacy and care is evident.
This connection between Grimshaw and the Pre-Raphaelites is not
coincidental. Being a self-taught artist, Grimshaw’s early influence
is actually attributed to a contemporary Leeds artist of the PreRaphaelite style, John William Inchbold (1830-1888). Leeds at the
time had several art galleries, and Grimshaw was therefore able to see
the work of William Holman Hunt (1827-1910), Henry Wallis (18301916), Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) and William Powell Frith (see
inventory). The technique and realism of Pre-Raphaelite style, as well
as the intensity and role of colour, went on to play a part in his later
landscapes, particularly with regards to the rejection of an academic,
idealised representation of nature. Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Grimshaw
would also draw on contemporary poetry and literature to inspire his
work.
In particular, Grimshaw is celebrated for his nostalgic night scenes
such as Nightfall Down the Thames (1880), The Thames by Moonlight
(1884) and Liverpool Quay by Moonlight (1887). Grimshaw exhibited
just five works in total at the Royal Academy, between 1874 and
1886.
³ Ibid., p. 116.
⁴ From letters dated 1845-46, in Photography in Print, ed. Goldberg, V., (University of
New Mexico Press, 1988), p. 153.