John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893)
"Silvery Moonlight"
Signed and dated 1882, originally signed, inscribed and dated verso, oil on canvas, 40cm by 60cm

Provenance: Richard Green, London

NG Bailey Group of Companies, Denton Hall, Ilkley

Atkinson Grimshaw is an artist whose fame in his lifetime as a painter of moonlit urban scenes and landscapes died with him in 1893. Indeed, he barely made it into the history books until the reputations of Victorian painters began to be restored in the early 1960s. Grimshaw was born and lived in Leeds, hence the city art gallery’s large collection of his paintings. In the 1970s, as a student working in Leeds Art Gallery, I lived in Headingley in a flat in a big house behind a high stone wall, surrounded by trees. As far as I was concerned, I lived in a Grimshaw painting, and the figure of girl walking along a moonlit road could be me. The melancholy of Grimshaw’s paintings appealed to me, just as it has done for so many others. Later, I learnt that Grimshaw’s shadowy lanes are generic views accumulated from his knowledge and observations of the city’s streets; that his life was troubled by grief and financial worries and that the subject we see here was hugely popular with art buyers. It was, therefore, one that was much repeated by Grimshaw, who, having become burdened with debt in later life, had to paint constantly to make a good enough living to support his large family, and to sustain his rather opulent taste in furniture, textiles and Chinese porcelain for Knostrop Hall, his richly decorated home.

These silvery moonlit scenes varied little in composition, the shiny wet road curving from the right across to the left or centre of the canvas; sometimes we see the sparkling road turn the corner, at others we do not, but always we see the high stone walls, the wintry trees and a gate that firmly closes us out of the grounds of a large, sombre looking house, a few squares of light glowing in its windows.

In 1882, when Silvery Moonlight was painted, Grimshaw was working in London in a bid for success on the London art scene. He hired a studio in Chelsea and took with him his live-in model, Agnes Leefe, whom he introduced into his Leeds household in 1879, much to his wife Frances’s fury. Grimshaw made many night-time paintings of London street-scenes, not only of the heart of the city but also of Hampstead, one of them a view of Heath Street (Tate), with the ubiquitous figure of a woman in black holding an umbrella, also painted in 1882. Silvery Moonlight may well have been painted with Hampstead in mind, with its tall city houses extravagantly lit up on every floor, compared to the subdued lights of Yorkshire homes, where a servant girl often walks along the dark lane or a courting couple hide themselves in the darkness. In this painting we have a horse-drawn cart, its owner walking ahead.

Grimshaw always provides a human presence under the moonlight, but they are never the wealthy owners of the illuminated houses; these are the lower-class workers who serve them, romanticised by the artist in a dreamlike setting of his own invention, one that has been much-loved by collectors and gallery viewers for generations.

Jane Sellars MBE (2022)

We are grateful to Jane Sellars MBE for her assistance in catalguing this lot.