John Atkinson Grimshaw

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 16 March 1973, lot 47;

Where acquired by a private collector;

Thence by inheritance to his brother;

By whom sold, ('Property of a New York Collector'), New York, Christie's, 26 October 2016, lot 21;

Where acquired by the present owner.

John Atkinson Grimshaw resigned from his job as a railway clerk in 1861 at the age of twenty-four to pursue a career in art. He had no formal training in painting and was from a strict family of Baptists who opposed his choice of profession – his mother is said to have turned off the gas-supply to the room he used for painting and even burnt his paints in the fire. He had to learn for himself by studying the work of others and by painting what he saw in the landscape around him. He was self-taught and determined, and under the patronage of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society he started to exhibit in 1862. In the still-lifes and landscapes painted by Grimshaw in the 1860s there was an emphasis on painting nature with accuracy. This was unmistakably inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites and the writings of John Ruskin, who declared in his work Modern Painters (1843) that artists should strive for a ‘bona fide imitation of nature… rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing...’ Grimshaw first landscapes concentrated on close-up studies of mossy banks in woodland, such as Boulders in Storsforth Wood of 1863 (sold in these rooms, 15 December 2016, lot 13) and A Mossy Glen of 1864 (Bankfield Museum, Halifax). By 1867 when he painted Beechwood, he had begun to paint more expansive landscapes and even included animals and figures for scale and vitality, such as the young girl and her dog seen in Beechwood. There are only a handful of these pictures, Autumn Sunlight of 1869 being another example (sold in these rooms 12 June 2003, lot 209) which has similar sparkling and brilliant sunlight and shadows. The most impressive pictures from this period are the magnificent studies of autumnal decay Ghyll Beck, Barden, Yorkshire of 1867 (collection of Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber) and Autumn Glory, The Old Mill of 1869 (Leeds City Art Gallery) painted in the grounds of Dunham Massey Park in Cheshire.

Grimshaw had seen the work of at least a few contemporary artists exhibited in local galleries in Leeds, including the brilliantly-lit and highly-detailed landscapes of John William Inchbold, who was a personal acquaintance of the Pre-Raphaelites and John Ruskin. It is probable that the aspirational Grimshaw met Inchbold, and the overall treatment of his early paintings certainly bears similarity to Inchbold’s works. The clear, crisp light of Beechwood is very similar to that present in many of Inchbold’s pictures and shows a fascination with lighting-effects years before he developed the urban night-scenes that defined his later years.

The following of Grimshaw’s technique of the 1860s is very apparent in Beechwood; ‘A thin piece of wood – often the pointed end of a small brush handle – has been drawn in fine lines or little dashes into wet paint to simulate highlights on the surface of the water. This allows the light of the ground to do the work, rather than trying to create the effect by adding light coloured flecks of paint afterwards. When working with transparent layers as Grimshaw did, it is always better to use the ground to create highlights where feasible, a basic principle actually used when working with watercolours... Even though Grimshaw worked mainly in oils, much of his technique owes more to watercolour painting than oil painting methods.’¹

¹ J. Sellers (ed.), Atkinson Grimshaw – Painter of Moonlight, 2011, pp. 135–37.