Last Sun­day I popped along to see Monet’s icon­ic The Water-Lily Pond, on loan at York Art Gallery, and very nice it was too, being the cen­tre­piece of a nice col­lec­tion of key loans fea­tur­ing var­i­ous French en plein air pre­cur­sors to Impres­sion­ism. How­ev­er, whilst there, I was remind­ed that the gallery had also recent­ly acquired for its per­ma­nent col­lec­tion a piece by an artist a lit­tle clos­er to home, Leeds-born John Atkin­son Grimshaw, known not for the Impres­sion­is­tic brush­work or gar­den scenes of Mon­et and his ilk but for real­is­tic noc­tur­nal scenes of urban land­scapes. The paint­ing is Liv­er­pool Docks at Night (1870s) and it’s a fine exam­ple of Grimshaw’s oeu­vre. It was also some­thing of a coup for York Art Gallery, giv­en that it had been accept­ed by HM Gov­ern­ment in lieu of inher­i­tance tax from a col­lec­tion and had been allo­cat­ed to the gallery for the bar­gain­ous price of £0.

Grimshaw was born in a back-to-back house in Park Street, Leeds, in 1836, and at first looked des­tined for a nor­mal, anony­mous life —  he mar­ried his cousin Frances at age twen­ty and got a job as clerk for the Great North­ern Rail­way. How­ev­er, the young John had an artis­tic gift and an ambi­tion, and it must have tak­en a great deal of courage and self-belief for him to dis­may his par­ents by pack­ing in his job and launch­ing him­self as a painter, but he did just that, in 1861. His pri­ma­ry artis­tic influ­ence was the Pre-Raphaelites and true to their style he paint­ed with accu­rate colour and light­ing and with vivid detail. Although he did start out paint­ing a vari­ety of gen­res, Grimshaw was lat­er drawn to depict­ing moon­lit views of city streets in Leeds and Lon­don, and dock­side scenes in Hull, Liv­er­pool, and Glas­gow. James McNeill Whistler, with whom Grimshaw worked lat­er in his career in his Chelsea stu­dios, said: “I con­sid­ered myself the inven­tor of noc­turnes until I saw Grim­my’s moon­lit pic­tures”.

Unlike Whistler’s Impres­sion­is­tic night scenes, “Grimmy’s” noc­turnes were sharply focused and almost pho­to­graph­ic in their qual­i­ty, and there is an eerie warmth about them. Rather than con­cen­trat­ing on the dirty and depress­ing aspects of indus­tri­al life (that he would have had no trou­ble find­ing), Grimshaw imbued his paint­ings with a lyri­cal evo­ca­tion of the urban land­scape and there is poet­ry in his cap­tured mists, reflect­ed street­light in wet pave­ments, and dark fig­ures wrapped up against the weath­er. His twi­light cities became his “brand” and became very pop­u­lar with his mid­dle-class patrons; he must have done well because by the 1870s he and his wife were liv­ing at Knos­trup Old Hall, in the Tem­ple Newsam area of Leeds, a far cry from the back-to-back in Park Street.

Here is a favourite of mine, Boar Lane, Leeds (1881), a street we Leeds dwellers have walked down many a time on a win­ter’s day like this.