“I Considered Myself the Inventor of Nocturnes Until I saw Grimmy's Moonlit Pictures.” Or: The Twilight Genius of John Atkinson Grimshaw:

Whilst I’m no expert on Victorian art, I certainly appreciate some of it, mostly the paintings of typical scenes of everyday life that show how things looked and how life was lived in the nineteenth century.

The scene painters of the age give us a glimpse into the world they lived in, and whilst not as reliable as photographs, paintings of street scenes, or important and even just average or normal places of the time, can momentarily take us there and show us what it was like to live in the time the painting was produced.

My only previous post about a Victorian artist was in October, when I wrote about Richard Dadd, (you can read that here) Whereas Dadd in himself is, to me anyway, a lot more interesting than his art, today I’m writing about a much more ordinary man, but an ordinary man who painted the most extraordinary paintings; John Atkinson Grimshaw, whose works are a joy to look at, not only aesthetically, but also as documents of the age in which he lived. His work is possibly my favourite of all Victorian art – or at least his work from the 1870’s and 1880’s – because he doesn’t paint wonderful pictures of fairies, mythical scenes or bowls of fruit (although he did at other stages in his career) but shows Victorian life as it was in the industrial cities, the back alleys, the bays and the ports and the streets of the nineteenth century.

Grimshaw

To me, photographs and pictures of the Victorian’s environment are very important and fascinating, and I’d rather look at one painting of an empty street in London at dusk than a hundred paintings of Greek Gods or Arthurian Legends. Of course, that’s not to say I can’t appreciate such pieces of work, such as Waterhouse’s ‘The Lady of Shallot’, for example, which is another of my favourites, but as a person who studies Victoriana and would dearly love to be able to go back and wander around a Victorian city in Victorian times for even ten minutes, paintings such as Grimshaw’s, and the pictures taken by street photographers of the time are the closest I will ever get.

So who was this Grimshaw?

He was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, in 1836, and when he was sixteen, in 1852, he took a job as a clerk at the Great Northern Railway office in Leeds. Leeds had several art galleries and Grimshaw was inspired by the work of artists such as Holman Hunt, Henry Wallis and William Powell Frith.
His love of art got the better of him, and he quit his job as a clerk in favour of becoming a full-time artist, a move his parents vehemently disapproved of. They were strict Baptists and strongly disapproved of his interest in painting. On one occasion his mother even went so far as to destroy all his paints. Undeterred, Grimshaw soldiered on, and in 1858 he married Francis Hubbard – known as Fanny – a cousin of the artist Thomas Sidney Cooper, after which he was able to devote himself to his hobby, and turn it into a job.

He began exhibiting in 1862, under the patronage of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, mostly with well-observed and detailed still-life’s, or paintings of birds. Further success came when one of his paintings was accepted by the Royal Academy, and Grimshaw started to make more money when London art dealer William Agnew began purchasing his work. By the 1870s he had become successful enough to rent a seventeenth century mansion in Scarborough, Knostrop Old Hall, which was perched upon a cliff-top and had magnificent views of both the north and south bays. He named their new home Castle by the Sea, after a poem by Longfellow. The mansion itself and Scarborough became favourite subjects of Grimshaw’s and the move to the coast inspired a lot of his most aesthetically pleasing work. It also fed his fascination with maritime scenes of ships, docks and the sea.

At this stage of his career he painted a lot of interior scenes, with ‘Dulce Domum’ (1855) being an excellent example of his typical work through the 1850’s, but in the 1870’s he began to experiment with different techniques and subjects in his work, and had varying success with his new ideas but his big break came with the night scenes he began to paint, and for which he is best known today. In the mid-seventies he took a second house in Scarborough, and there are many paintings of seascapes at night from the area. Later, he also traveled to Liverpool and London in search of material, during which period he painted one of my favourites, ‘Nightfall on the Thames’ (below) in 1880.

Nightfall on the Thames

‘On Hampstead Hill’ is considered to be one of Grimshaw's finest pieces, showing his attention to detail, containing various sources of light all in one painting set at dusk. The chill sky and the reflections on the wet road in this painting are a testament to the skill of Grimshaw, who, it must be remembered, was a self-taught artist.

Later on in his career, these scenes of urban areas at twilight, bathed in either moonlight or the glow of street lamps became very popular, particularly with the middle classes, and indeed, Grimshaw painted mostly for private art collectors, and exhibited only five pieces of work at the Royal Academy between 1874 and 1886, and one piece at the Grosvenor Gallery.

On Hampstead Hill

He often painted very specific scenes in his work that epitomized the subject he was depicting. They often typified a season, city, time of day or type of weather. These intricate details give his paintings a very real and atmospheric mood and feeling. The character of the cities of London, Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow attracted him, as well as Scarborough and Whitby, and he often returned to these places to depict them at dusk or night in his work.

In the 1880s, Grimshaw used a London studio in Chelsea, not far from a similar studio used by fellow artist, James Whistler. (Possibly most famous for his painting, ‘Mother’, which appeared in the first Mr. Bean movie.) The artists became friends, and after visiting Grimshaw, Whistler remarked that: "I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw Grimmy's moonlit pictures."

Praise indeed. But, unlike the more impressionistic night scenes Whistler was producing, ‘Grimmy’ was painting realistic images that looked almost like photographs, giving us wonderful glimpses into the Victorian dusk and night of cities, towns and the sea.

It was in the early 1880’s that an unknown financial crisis hit Grimshaw. Following this, he abandoned his Chelsea studio and returned to Leeds. Once there, he began to paint quite prolifically, producing around fifty paintings a year. Notable works from this period include ‘Park Row, Leeds’ (1882) ‘London Bridge, Half Tide’ (1884) ‘An Autumn Lane’ (1883) and ‘Hampstead’ (1881)

As well as producing his night scenes in this period, he also began to experiment with different techniques, such as painting over photographs and mixing materials such as sand into his paints to get the effects he was striving for. He had also started to experiment with different subjects, most notably, fairies, with his painting, ‘Iris’ (1886) still being popular today.

Despite his fondness for painting dirty industrial Victorian cities at twilight, Grimshaw managed to capture the beauty of the fog, mist, rain and coolness of the scenes and turn them into something poetic, and at the same time realistic. These traits have seen his paintings appear as the cover image of many books, including an edition of M.V Hughes ‘A London Child of the 1870’s’ which features Grimshaw’s ‘View of heath Street by Night’ on the cover, (as does a 1980’s edition of Stevenson’s ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’) A 1980’s edition of Anne Bronte’s ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ is fronted by Grimshaw’s ‘Knostrop Hall, Moonlight’  and the cover of Anne Perry’s ‘Southampton Row’ is adorned with the wonderful ‘Reflections on the Thames, Westminster’.

As well as these, Grimshaw’s work has appeared on the cover of many and various compendiums of ghost stories, and even a Sherlock Holmes book, with his paintings evoking the mood, mystery and the mist of the era.
Grimshaw and his wife, Fanny, had fifteen children together, although, sadly only six survived into adulthood, and of these, Arthur Grimshaw (1864–1913), Louis Grimshaw (1870–1944), Wilfred Grimshaw (1871–1937) and Elaine Grimshaw (1877–1970), also became painters.

In the early 1890’s, Grimshaw’s work appeared to be developing a much more free style, and taking on a new direction. He painted ‘Sand, Sea and Sky; a Summer Fantasy’ in 1892, which shows a lighter side to his work, and in 1893 he painted the detailed and yet slightly abstract ‘At Anchor’ perhaps showing that he had been influenced by some of Whistler’s work, but sadly, John Atkinson Grimshaw died of cancer in October 1893 aged only 57.

Sand, Sea and Sky: a Summer Fantasy

He is buried in Woodhouse Cemetery in Leeds. Little else is known about this talented character as, unlike other artists of the period, such as Vincent Van Gogh, who left notebooks, letters and sketches after they had died (which explains why we are able to have so many books detailing the lives of such artists) Grimshaw left nothing behind him after he died. No letters, journals, notebooks or papers exist, and because of this we have little more knowledge or information on the life or career of one of our recent histories most talented painters. 

For space reasons I have only included a few of Grimshaw’s pieces, but you can see an attractive slideshow of all of Grimshaw’s work here

Julia Margaret Cameron - Victorian Photographer

A few months ago whilst researching Victorian England between 1860 and 1875, a name cropped up that intrigued me, and that name was Julia Margaret Cameron. I noted that she was a pioneering female photographer, and being interested in both Victoriana AND photography, my interest was piqued.

Julia Margaret Cameron

Photography was born in the late 1830’s when, in England, Henry Fox-Talbot, and in France, Louis Daguerre (after whom the daguerreotype is named) took photographs for the first time. Between then and the 1850’s, photography moved on in leaps and bounds as various techniques were discovered, such as the calotype process (read about here ) and the stereoscopic viewer (the fore-runner of 3D imagery) these were perfected and then bettered, until in 1888 the Kodak box camera brought photography to the general public, and the holiday snap was born.

Trawling through Victorian photography is incredibly interesting I think. Every picture is a snapshot into a life or an event, and gives us a glimpse into the past like no other period of history, which is one of the reasons I love the Victorian period so much – its close enough to almost touch because of, in large part, the photography, and yet, its almost a hundred and ten years in the past.

Amongst these photographs that we can see that show us the everyday of the 19^th century, are photographs that are closer to being art than just glimpses through the windows of the past, and for me, no photographer’s work demonstrates this like the often-haunting work of Julia Margaret Cameron.

Despite not coming to photography until she was forty-eight years old in 1864, the art was still young enough for Cameron to develop her own distinctive style of mixing photography with fantasy – often relating to Arthurian legend, and also her distinctive close-cropped portraits. As far as careers’ go, Cameron’s photographic career was short, lasting only eleven years, but in that time she produced some stunning work, including portraits of Charles Darwin, J.F.W Herschel and Julia Prinsep Jackson – her niece, and mother to Virginia Woolf.

Using soft focus, she captured beautiful pictures that she clearly held dear, as during her career, Cameron registered each of her photographs with the copyright office and kept detailed records. Her shrewd business sense is one reason that so many of her works survive today. Another reason that many of Cameron's portraits are significant is because they are often the only existing photograph of historical figures. Many paintings and drawings exist, but, at the time, photography was still a new and challenging medium for someone outside a typical portrait studio.

My favourite photograph of Cameron’s is “I Wait” which depicts a little girl as an angel. The little girl in the picture is Rachel Gurney, Cameron’s niece, who went on to become the Countess of Dudley before drowning in Ireland in 1920.

"I Wait"

I find this photo particularly haunting and beautiful at the same time.

Cameron was born in Calcutta, India, as her father worked for the East India Company, and she was educated in France before moving back to India where she married a member of the law commission based in Calcutta – Charles Hay Cameron, who was twenty years older than her, and would become a future portrait subject.

In 1848 he retired and they left India for London where, in 1863, Cameron’s daughter, also named Julia, gave her a camera as a gift, and Cameron threw herself into photography with fierce determination.

1873 her only daughter died, and for the rest of that year there were no Julia Margaret Cameron photographs registered.

In 1875 Julia and Charles moved back to India, where Julia tried to continue with her photography but complained in letters about the difficulties of getting chemicals and pure water to develop and print photographs. Also, in India, she did not have access to Little Holland House's artistic community. She also did not have a market to distribute her photographs as she had in England. Because of this, Cameron took fewer pictures in India. These pictures were of posed Indian natives, paralleling the posed pictures that Cameron had taken of neighbours in England. Almost none of Cameron's work from India survives.

In 1879, aged 63, Julia caught a chill and soon died.

Despite the beauty of her work, it was not until 1948 that her photography became more widely known when Helmut Gernsheim wrote a book on her work.

In 1977 Gernsheim noted that although a great photographer, Cameron had "left no mark" on the history of Photography because her work had never been imitated, but this situation was already changing by then thanks to his popularisation of her work.

If you wish to know more about not only Julia Margaret Cameron, but Victorian photography too, see the book by Victoria Olsen entitled “The Story of Julia Margaret Cameron and Victorian Photography” which you can find on Amazon here

And for those interested in the history of photography, a timeline can be viewed here

Richard Dadd

The average person on the street will probably know very little about Richard Dadd. In fact, plenty of people with an interest in Victoriana will be unaware of him, but for me he is one of those characters like Dickens, Bazalgette, Wilde, Brunel and Queen Victoria, who is almost the personified summation of the mid to second half of the nineteenth century.
Dadd was an artist in an age where art was hugely popular and important. Art adorned the walls of every home in the middle and upper classes. Galleries popped up all over the country, notably the Tate in 1887, previously named the National Gallery of British Art before Henry Tate, the sugar company owner and collector of art, funded a renovation to house important works, including his own personal collection. For a vast period of the nineteenth century, it was the only form of visual documentation and representation people had.
Art was, and still is to some degree, something that moved with fashion. The Pre-Raphaelite movement of the 1850’s was somewhat of an art revolution, and was to the art world as punk was to the music world a hundred and twenty years later in 1977. The pre-Raphaelites painted beautiful paintings, but they were unpopular with certain sections of society for their lack of moral message.

The Victorians, for the most part, liked their art to have this “moral message”, now, I must state here that Victorian art is in no way my forte, so I’m not going to go into any more detail in case I get something wrong, other than to give a quick example of this. 
The painting on the right is the only one that comes immediately to mind, and is by the painter Augustus Egg:


The painting, which is one of a trio, is a swipe at fallen women. This is the first of the three, and as the paintings progress, her situation gets worse, until, in the final painting, she sits homeless under a railway arch having lost everything. In this one, the husband sits crestfallen at the table. His unfaithful wife lays prostrate upon the ground in apology (or remorse at being found out by the intercepted love letter on the floor). But, the subtle clues in the painting depict this beautifully, and are just what the Victorians were looking for.
Also on the floor is half of an apple - the fruit of temptation and the children are playing with cards (the mother was a poor one, and allowed her children to gamble) but the house of cards they have made is tumbling (mirroring the family, which is crumbling due to her actions) the children also stack their cards on a book by Balzac, who wrote racy adulterous novels.

Those interested in Victorian art and its culture should do their best to get hold of the Jeremy Paxman BBC documentary series “The Victorians – Britain through the paintings of the age” where he goes into far more detail about this, and many other paintings. The series is available on DVD, best look on Amazon – I bought it from HMV and it was £20.

Back to my original point after a small detour - Richard Dadd. The second reason I find him such an age-defining figure is that he suffered from mental illness – that is to say, he was “mad” and became a patient at the notorious Bethlem hospital, or “Bedlam” as it was known.
By this time, Bedlam had changed a lot since the days where it was a dungeon of lunatics chained to the walls as depicted by Hogarth in the last scene of “The Rake’s Progress”. In the previous century the hospital was for all intents and purposes a human zoo, to which the middle and upper classes would visit and be amused by the antics of the mentally ill patients, in his excellent book “Curiosities of London”, John Timbs gives us a brief description of Bedlam:

“Bethlem became one of "the sights of London;" and such was the mischief occasioned by this brutal and degrading practice, that, to prevent disturbances, the porter was annually sworn a constable, and attended with other servants to keep order. So late as 1814, the rooms resembled dog-kennels; the female patients chained by one arm or leg to the wall, were coveted by a blanket-gown only, the feet being naked ; and they lay upon straw. The male patients were chained, handcuffed, or locked to the avail; and chains were universally substituted for the strait-waistcoat. One Norris, stated to be refractory, was chained by a strong iron ring, riveted round his neck, his arms pinioned by an iron bar, and his waist similarly secured, so that he could only advance twelve inches from the wall, the length of his chain; and thus he had been "encaged and chained more than twelve years;"”

In Dadd’s time though, the hospital had gone through much reform and change, and is described by John Timbs in the same book:

“Few sights can be more interesting than the present condition of the interior of Bethlem. The scrupulous cleanliness of the house, the decent attire of the patients, and the unexpectedly small number of those under restraint, (sometimes not one person throughout the building), lead the visitors, not unnaturally, to conclude that the management of lunatics has here attained perfection; while the quiet and decent demeanour of inmates might almost make him doubt that he is really in a madhouse.”

Bedlam still took visitors who, upon writing to the governor could stroll around the asylum, although, quite what pleasure could be garnered I am unsure, but it seems some quarters of Victorian society were still interested such things.

So, Dadd was an artist, which was popular in these times, and he was also incarcerated in the oldest and most famous lunatic asylum in the country, but why was he there?

In the summer of 1842, he went on a tour of Europe and the middle east with Sir Thomas Phillips where he was to take drawings of the expedition. After an exhaustive and extensive tour in places such as Constantinople and Egypt, Dadd began to suffer with what was apparently bad sunstroke and prolonged headaches. The expedition continued through Africa and back into mainland Europe, where Dadd suddenly became paranoid, delusional and violent, culminating in an attempt to attack the Pope in Italy.
Eventually it became clear that Dadd was not being troubled by sunstroke, and a year after the expedition had begun, Sir Thomas Phillips sent the artist back to London where he was examined and adjudged to be non compos mentis – not of sound mind.

Despite this diagnosis, Dadd was neither treated nor incarcerated. His mental state became worse and he began to exhibit behaviour that we would consider symptomatic of conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disease. He believed that other-worldly entities had entrusted him with doing battle with the devil, and that the devil was a shape-shifter and would try to befriend him.

His father, who was, for obvious reasons concerned by the mental health of his son, took Dadd to Cobham to rest and relax, and hopefully allow his mind to calm of its own accord. During a walk through the country Dadd violently attacked and killed his father with a knife and a razor, before immediately taking a ship to Calais.

In France he was arrested for trying to cut someone’s throat, and confessed to the murder of his father. When searched by the police during his arrest, a “death list” entitled “people who must die” was found on his person, the first name on the list: His father. Dadd was returned to England and pleaded guilty to murder, but due to his mental instability he was committed to Bethlem asylum rather than one of London’s gaols.
In Bethlem, he was allowed all the tools he required to continue painting, and during his stay produced some of his best work, such as “The Fair Feller's Master Stroke”, “Oberon and Titania” “Portrait of a Young Man” and “Contradiction”.

On an episode of The Antiques Roadshow in 1987, a gentleman brought onto the programme this painting that had been sitting in his attic for many years. The antique expert on the show revealed it to be a long-lost Dadd watercolour entitled “The Artist’s Halt in the Desert” which depicted a scene from the expedition with Sir Thomas Phillips with the traveling party resting by the Dead Sea. Dadd painted it whilst incarcerated, entirely from memory. The painting was bought by the British Museum for £100,000, and is still there.

In 1863 Dadd was transferred from Bethlem to Broadmoor where he continued painting until his death in 1886 Due to an apparent lung disease.

As I said at the very start of this article, Dadd is one of the figures that, in my mind, springs immediately to mind when I think of the people of the Victorian period.

He was an artistic genius in an important period for art, he was “mad” in an era of huge scientific and medical strides forward that was fascinated by madness to the point that ladies and gentleman would pay to stroll around an asylum, and he was a tragic figure in a time when tragedy was abound, whether it be examples of unrivalled poverty and conditions of the slums, homelessness, the shadow of the workhouse or the characters in the novels of Dickens.

For those who are interested in Victorian murderers but want to read about someone with a bit more depth, someone a bit more fascinating and human than the same old tired Jack the Ripper “casebooks” then I can recommend a bit of reading on Richard Dadd, one of the Victorian era’s most gifted and yet tragic figures.