More than 60 oils and watercolours invite reassessment of the self-taught Yorkshire artist's life and career
An exhibition of work by Britain's master of moonlight oil paintings, John Atkinson Grimshaw, has revealed an extraordinary struggle by the self-taught Yorkshireman to keep his career on the road.
Lionised by Victorian society for his delicate studies of twilit landscapes, and portrayed in studio photographs as an aesthetic dandy, the artist was in fact dogged by debt, an opulent lifestyle beyond his means, and the premature deaths of 10 of his 16 children.
"He painted, painted and painted," said Jane Sellars, curator of the Mercer gallery in Harrogate, where the exhibition has opened. "He painted to pay bills, painted keep his family together, and painted in lieu of rent on his palatial homes."
More than 60 oils and watercolours have been assembled by Sellars, some after long negotiations with private collectors, whose predecessors were quick to patronise Grimshaw when he threw in his safe job as a railway clerk to make a living from art. By contrast, his parents, a Leeds police officer and a mother who ran a grocery, tried to discourage his romantic ambitions, refusing to allow a fire in his youthful studio and throwing away his paints.
"The amount of work he had to produce drove him to find quicker and quicker ways of painting," said Sellars. "This led to pot-boiling work, but also to discoveries which brought us the wonderfully atmospheric effect of his moon-washed landscapes and streets of gaslit shops. It made him inventive and persistent," said Sellars, who has commissioned a series of expert studies for an accompanying book about Grinshaw. They include a new analysis of the painter's techniques by artist Steve Phillips which also reveals how financial pressure drove the painter's inventive search for new and speedier ways of completing canvasses.
This is the biggest collection of work on show since the Leeds exhibition in 1979 that marked Grimshaw's re-emergence. Sidelined in common with most Victorian painters, Grimshaw has since become one of the era's most sought-after artists. His signature methods include an exceptionally quick-drying varnish (probably copal oil, which is no longer available), and a sparing use of paint – to save money, but at the same time giving a delicate, thinly-applied effect that allows the underlying paper to provide some of the paintings' eerie light.
Another trademark subject, rain-washed streets in views of northern cities and central London, had the bonus of needing a smaller palette. Phillips said: "It was shrewd move because a wet road reflects the sky so the same basic colouring can be used." Introduced as an economy, the practice became distinctive.
This was recognised by contemporaries; Whistler said after a visit to Grimshaw's studio in Chelsea: "I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy's moonlit pictures."
Grimshaw repaid the compliment by heavily underscoring passages about moonlight, mist and city streets in his copy of Whistler's book The Gentle Art of Making Enemies which is also on show at the Harrogate exhibition.
Faced with rents for his Leeds mansion, Knostrop Hall, and a bizarre home in Scarborough called Castle by the Sea, the artist eventually resorted to an upmarket version of children's colouring-in. Two atmospheric London nocturnes are carefully labelled 'oil and photograph' in the exhibition, because beneath Grimshaw's skilfully but rapidly-applied paint are photographs instead of the artist's traditional preliminary sketch.
New findings are also drawn from unpublished memoirs by the artist's family, which included a son who became a map illustrator for the then Manchester Guardian. In a poignant passage, one of them describes how the dying Grimshaw, who contracted cancer aged 57, hauled himself up the stairs to his studio at Knostrop where bills were still owing, to "paint and paint again".