John Atkinson Grimshaw - Under the Moonbeams (hall)

dated and signed l.l.: 1882+/ Atkinson Grimshaw

oil on canvas
30 by 24 in.
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 180,000 GBP
http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?sale_number=L07131&live_lot_id=7

Alexander Robertson, Atkinson Grimshaw, 1996, p. 90, illus. p. 91, pl. 79


'When he wished to be more poetic, Grimshaw would present something grander, with suggestions of lovers meeting in secret, as in Under the Moonbeams... Such paintings echo Tennysonian feelings about love: a night-time's longing, 'Half the night I waste in sighs' ('Maud') or clandestine meetings, as of Leolin and Edith in 'Aylmer's Fields':
Yet once by night again the lovers met,
A perilous meeting under the tall pines
That darken'd all the northward of the Hall.'
(Alexander Robertson, Atkinson Grimshaw, 1996, p. 90)

Romance and intrigue were integral to Grimshaw's paintings, whether he was depicting the moonlit assignation of dock-hands and shop girls at the quays of Scarborough and Whitby or the melancholic meanderings of lone figures in the suburbs of Leeds. In Under the Moonbeams Grimshaw added a further element of pathos by clothing the figures of the young gallant punting his beloved in a lily-strewn pool, in eighteenth-century garb.

One of the items included in John Atkinson Grimshaw's house sale held after his death, was a copy of Peter Frederick Robinson's book on architecture Vitruvius Britannicus of 1833, which explained in detail the architecture of the great Elizabethan house Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. Grimshaw's paintings also bear testimony to the artist's love for old buildings and in virtually every suburban street scene by Grimshaw, an ancient hall or villa holds a prominent position. Grimshaw was lucky and successful enough to be able to afford to live in a beautiful Jacobean manor house, Knostrop Hall outside Leeds (no longer extant) and as Alexander Robinson has noted '... it would seem that past and present were equally real; just as myth and legend were to be plundered for subjects, so actual and historical houses could be put together to form an archetypal mansion.' (Alexander Robinson, Atkinson Grimshaw, 1988, pg. 95) Thus the buildings in his paintings, although often based upon Knostrop, were often amalgams of various houses and not necessarily actual buildings. Even paintings with the word Knostrop written on the reverse cannot be guaranteed to depict Grimshaw's home as in most cases the inscription is merely the artist recording his address. Grimshaw certainly painted one picture of the front entrance to Knostrop in the 1880s, Knostrop Hall, Leeds (private collection) of 1882 and had painted several views in the 1870s, such as Knostrop Hall, Early Morning of 1870 (private collection).


The mansion depicted in Under the Moonbeams is not Knostrop and is likely to be an invented building, although its appearance in other paintings might suggest that it was a building known to Grimshaw. The manor is similar to that depicted in A Yorkshire Home of 1878 (Harrogate Museum and Art Gallery) and A Manor House in Autumn of 1881 (private collection) both of which are painted from the far side of a boating lake with majestic steps leading up from the waters to the house with its welcoming lights.

'The work of Atkinson Grimshaw is valuable and unique in several respects. He made a great popular success out of that amalgam of Pre-Raphaelite sentiment, nature and industry that dominated the culture of northern England in the later nineteenth century. His work is our only visual equivalent to the great epics of industrial change, the novels of Gaskell and Dickens.' (David Bromfield, Atkinson Grimshaw 1836-1893, exhibition catalogue, 1979-1980, p. 5)