John Atkinson Grimshaw, Autumn

JOHN ATKINSON GRIMSHAW

Richard Green is delighted to present a selection of five paintings by John Atkinson Grimshaw to celebrate the onset of autumn.

John Atkinson Grimshaw is acknowledged as one of the most eminent painters of the Victorian era. The gallery has been buying and selling paintings by Grimshaw for over sixty years, assisting in the foundation and development of some of the greatest private collections of the artist’s work, as well as museum collections, including Leeds Art Gallery and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. This exceptional group of paintings by Grimshaw features an evocative moonlit street, 1874, and four golden, autumnal vistas dating from 1878 to 1882. Representing archetypal lanes surrounding the grand mansions of late nineteenth century Leeds and documenting specific locations such as Stapleton Park and Knostrop Hall, these picturesque paintings record Grimshaw’s ascent from regional artist to national treasure, capturing as no other artist, the beauty and poetry of the Victorian age and the golden season.

Redolent of autumn, Grimshaw’s golden lane scenes are greatly sought after, the pale, delicate tonality of the setting sun, superbly juxtaposed with the rich, russet warmth of the tree-lined street strewn with fallen leaves. In these serene, nostalgic images, including paintings at the Yale Centre for British Art and the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Grimshaw captures the beauty to be found in the fading light of the golden season. As in his early, Pre-Raphaelite works, Grimshaw takes delight in observing the details of nature away from industrial life, carefully revealing the elegant, tapering branches and gilded, furrowed ground. Calligraphic shadows on the lichen-studded fence and wall brilliantly reflect the exquisite tracery of the boughs above, while dappled tufts of grass and moss in the foreground follow the path into the distance and Autumn’s waning glow.