There is no record that John Atkinson Grimshaw ever took a painting lesson. Until 1861 he was a railway clerk in Leeds, the son of strict Baptist parents, and his mother once destroyed all his paints. Twenty years later he was the painter who showed Victorian England its own industrial towns after dark, with gaslit shop windows, wet cobbles and the masts of ships in the haze.
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From Feathers to Gaslight
Grimshaw learned his trade by copying the things around him as closely as he could, first fruit, nests and birds, then rocks and valleys, often with the help of a photograph. In the 1870s he found the subject that made his name: the towns and docks of the North under the moon and the gas lamps.
Those pictures sold, and he needed them to sell. He had six surviving children, a seventeenth-century manor outside Leeds to keep up and, from 1879, debts that stayed with him to the end.
The twelve here follow his whole working life, from a study made in his twenties to two small canvases from his last years, with the money crisis of 1879 in the middle. They rise in fame toward his best-known canvas, and they keep coming back to Leeds, London, Scarborough and the Mersey waterfront.
12. Iris (1886)
A young woman with a pale glow around her head floats above an autumn pond, her body bent into a long curve between the bare trees. The pose only makes sense on the reverse, where Grimshaw wrote out her story in his own hand, copied from what he called an "Old Book." The picture is Iris.
He painted it in 1886, the year he turned fifty. Seven years earlier a financial disaster had cost him his house by the sea, and he now divided his time between his manor outside Leeds and a studio in Chelsea, in London, working to pay what he owed.
The figure itself was not new to him. This time, though, he treated her as a classical subject, a goddess instead of a fairy, fit for the Royal Academy's summer exhibition. The canvas was shown there that year, and it was the last time the Academy hung his work.
The model was probably Agnes Leefe, his young assistant, who also posed for many of the small figures walking through his town views. She died of tuberculosis four years later.
The text on the reverse is what explains the curve. Iris, the messenger of the goddess Juno, is sent out in autumn to wither the flowers and the leaves. She stops in front of a water lily and cannot bring herself to touch it, and for that disobedience she is turned into a rainbow. I read the arc of her body above the water as the shape she is about to take.
At a Glance
Artist: John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 to 1893)
Painted: 1886
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: Not published
Where to see it: Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds
11. Reflections on the Aire: On Strike (1879)
Seen from behind, a woman stands alone on a riverbank at night and looks across black water at the outline of an ironworks. No smoke rises from its chimneys. The reason is in the title Grimshaw gave the picture, Reflections on the Aire: On Strike, and it takes him further than he ever went again.