Atkinson Grimshaw: the painter who will be forever autumn

There are two painters whose work I’ve particularly looked out for when visiting galleries over the years: that Dutch painter of roistering peasant inebriates, Jan Steen, and Atkinson Grimshaw. 

       

     

                                          Piccadilly at Night                 

                                                       

Now, and for the next month or two, those of us who inhabit sprawling, busy river cities like London or Glasgow are living in the world of the Victorian painter, John Atkinson Grimshaw. He captured  chilly, rainy, late autumn and early winter dusk in a way no other painter has: his punctiliously realistic suburban and city scenes are drear and dreich – and mysterious and romantic and deeply alluring at the same time. He chose not to paint the run-down parts of industrial towns – no doubt he was keener to keep the commissions from his middle class patrons rolling in than exercise a social conscience – and I suspect it’s the lack of social preaching, of a moral dimension or a narrative, which makes his work so timeless. 

His paintings provide the same counterintuitive sensations of warmth and cosiness as Sherlock Holmes and M.R. James’s ghost stories.    

        

                

                                              Liverpool Quay by Moonlight

                          

A reproduction of, Liverpool Quay by Moonlight, has hung in our bedroom for over twenty years. Just look at it – have streetlamps or gas-light shining through windows ever looked more beguiling? Can’t you imagine yourself wrapped in the back of that hansom cab as you head for the bar of some big, over-heated Northern railway hotel, where you’re looking forward to puffing contentedly at a foot-long cigar and sipping a huge, silk-smooth brandy from a cut-glass goblet? We took the painting down for a few months and replaced it with something else (a poster featuring Canova’s The Three Graces, I think), but, come autumn, Grimshaw was back: it just wasn’t autumn without him.

                    

I experienced many soggy, darkling early winter evenings in Wimbledon, Cambridge, Paddington and other parts of London (in particular walking between Camden Town and Marylebone Road to my first job) well before I became aware of Grimshaw’s paintings, but they instantly recalled certain specific experiences – stopping by a church one dank evening just to the north of Regent’s Park; waiting for a friend in his rooms in Peterhouse, watching the mist creep across the lawn below as the darkness swallowed up gargoyles; lights glimmering in the houses along Wimbledon’s Southside Common as I took our dog for a stroll around Rushmere Pond. 

        

                                                      Sere and Yellow                              

Looking at a Grimshaw painting is to experience damp socks and greasy dead leaves squidging beneath your feet: it’s the promise of a hot cup of tea, a slab of Battenburg, and a steaming bath.

John Atkinson Grimshaw was born in Leeds in 1836. His parents were strict Baptists and his father was a policeman: they strongly disapproved of his interest in painting and his exasperated mother once destroyed all his paints in an effort to make him change his ways. Despite parental opposition, he gave up his job as a railway clerk at the age of 24 to take up painting full time. Four years later he was doing so well he was able to move his family to a large manor house two miles outside Leeds. He earned a good living doing for a decade before He really hit his stride in the mid-1870s, when he discovered his true, damp, foggy forte. 

He ended up with a studio in Chelsea, near Whistler - another Victorian non-moralist - who commented: "I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw Grimmy's moonlit pictures."