John Atkinson Grimshaw 1836-1893

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, John Atkinson Grimshaw painted a series of views of deserted suburban streets in London and Yorkshire. These images of a trysting couple or a solitary female figure making her way down a leaf and puddle strewn road, are perhaps the most emotive and typical of the artist, who was unrivalled in his depiction of the evening gloaming. Whether he was painting suburban roads, the docks at Whitby and Liverpool or the shopping streets of Leeds; busy and noisy places during the day, Grimshaw painted the silent solitary evening still, when the residents, dock-workers and shop assistants return home, leaving the streets deserted. The horses and carts, which have left their impressions in the damp soil of the road, have long since departed and the gateways have been closed to the outside world. There is an emotive sense of stillness and calm which pervades these romantic images of evening light.

In 1879 Grimshaw defaulted on a debt and the early 1880s was a time of financial hardship for the artist. However from an artistic perspective this was also a time of expansion and success when he painted many of his best works. The Trysting Tree is a display of the artist's extraordinary ability to depict atmosphere with the teal-tinted clouds, the leafless, autumnal trees and the rain soaked street acting in perfect harmony to create the sense of stillness and calm following a downpour. The light source from the high, full moon creates and demands an intricate and extensive pattern of reflection on the soaked road.

The essence of nature is tempered by the meticulous treatment of the architecture in this wealthy suburb.  Grimshaw juxtaposes natural light with artificial light as our gaze is drawn to the glow from the grand town house.  This focuses our attention on the human element of the work; the figure, so often solitary in Grimshaw's work, is joined by a couple producing a tantalising but subtle suggestion of romance.  The sense of mystery is further enhanced by the anonymity of the scene with the exact location withheld.

John Atkinson Grimshaw was arguably the most evocative painter of moonlit and evening scenes, who in the 1870s and 1880s, painted a series of pictures of the gloaming seen from the vantage of an elegant suburban road. Calmness and silence pervades these moody images in which the real subject is not the question of who these figures are or where they were painted, but the effects of the light upon their surroundings and the romantic connotations of moonlit meetings. The Victorians had a huge appetite for such romantic intrigue and it was a prevalent theme in the novels, plays and poetry of the age.  Grimshaw himself was inspired by the writings of Wordsworth, Browning, Shelley and in particular Tennyson.  Alexander Robertson sums up thus; 'A few lines from Tennyson's Enoch Arden seem to demonstrate this most succinctly:

'The climbing street, the mill, the leafy lanes,
The peacock-yewtree and the lonely Hall,
The horse he drove, the boat he sold, the chill
November dawns and dewy glooming downs,
The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves'