John Atkinson Grimshaw - A Lady in a Classical Interior

signed and dated 1874

oil on panel
10½x19½in.
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 14,400 GBP
http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?sale_number=L07131&live_lot_id=23

This painting of a woman reclining on a bench or bed in a loosely defined but recognisably classical interior is one of a small group of figurative subjects by the artist from the 1870s. Although Grimshaw had already embarked on a career as a landscape painter and had begun to gain a reputation and some degree of commercial success for his Pre-Raphaelite-derived views of the upland landscapes of the Pennines and Lake District, he seems to have decided in the 1870s to attempt a more ambitious style of art. This was the period when Grimshaw turned to the paintings of the Dutch-born artist Lawrence Alma Tadema - who lived in London from 1870 - for new ideas about how the ancient world might be evoked in figurative art. Grimshaw may have seen paintings by Tadema in Yorkshire - the Dutch artist's The Vintage Festival (Hamburg Kunsthalle) was shown in Hasse's gallery in Leeds in 1872. Furthermore, in the 1870s, Grimshaw took to making regular visits to London, and seems to have made a positive effort to respond to and assimilate new metropolitan artistic ideas, as well as to attempt to extend the market for his own works. On occasions he found himself represented in London exhibitions - for example at the premises of Thomas Agnew - alongside works by Tadema.

The evocation of the ancient world - by the introduction of columns, statuary, mosaics and classical craters - as seen in Grimshaw's Woman in a Classical Interior - is strikingly reminiscent of certain paintings by Tadema. Grimshaw, like Tadema, seems to have relished such exotic trappings for their own decorative value within the composition, rather than intending to use them to give archaeological authenticity to the painting.