British 1836-1893 Atkinson Grimshaw Gallery Grimshaw's primary influence was the Pre-Raphaelites. True to the Pre-Raphaelite style, he put forth landscapes of accurate color and lighting, and vivid detail. He often painted landscapes that typified seasons or a type of weather; city and suburban street scenes and moonlit views of the docks in London, Leeds, Liverpool, and Glasgow also figured largely in his art. By applying his skill in lighting effects, and unusually careful attention to detail, he was often capable of intricately describing a scene, while strongly conveying its mood. His "paintings of dampened gas-lit streets and misty waterfronts conveyed an eerie warmth as well as alienation in the urban scene." Dulce Domum (1855), on whose reverse Grimshaw wrote, "mostly painted under great difficulties," captures the music portrayed in the piano player, entices the eye to meander through the richly decorated room, and to consider the still and silent young lady who is meanwhile listening. Grimshaw painted more interior scenes, especially in the 1870s, when he worked until the influence of James Tissot and the Aesthetic Movement. On Hampstead Hill is considered one of Grimshaw's finest, exemplifying his skill with a variety of light sources, in capturing the mood of the passing of twilight into the onset of night. In his later career this use of twilight, and urban scenes under yellow light were highly popular, especially with his middle-class patrons. His later work included imagined scenes from the Greek and Roman empires, and he also painted literary subjects from Longfellow and Tennyson ?? pictures including Elaine and The Lady of Shalott. (Grimshaw named all of his children after characters in Tennyson's poems.) In the 1880s, Grimshaw maintained a London studio in Chelsea, not far from the comparable facility of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. After visiting Grimshaw, Whistler remarked that "I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw Grimmy's moonlit pictures."[9] Unlike Whistler's Impressionistic night scenes, however, Grimshaw worked in a realistic vein: "sharply focused, almost photographic," his pictures innovated in applying the tradition of rural moonlight images to the Victorian city, recording "the rain and mist, the puddles and smoky fog of late Victorian industrial England with great poetry." Some artists of Grimshaw's period, both famous and obscure, generated rich documentary records; Vincent Van Gogh and James Smetham are good examples. Others, like Edward Pritchett, left nothing. Grimshaw left behind him no letters, journals, or papers; scholars and critics have little material on which to base their understanding of his life and career. Grimshaw died 13 October 1893, and is buried in Woodhouse cemetery, Leeds. His reputation rested, and his legacy is probably based on, his townscapes. The second half of the twentieth century saw a major revival of interest in Grimshaw's work, with several important exhibits of his canon.  Related Paintings of Atkinson Grimshaw :. | Lights in the Harbour | Reflections on the Thames Westminster | The Old Mill Cheshire | Whitby Harbour | Detail of Two Thousand Year Ago |
Related Artists:
Alexander Benois
1856-1933
charles billoin
1813-1869
CAPRIOLO, Domenico
Italian painter, Venetian school (b. 1494, Venezia, d. 1528, Treviso) Italian painter. He moved from Venice to Treviso c. 1517, where he is well documented (though there is little about his painting). In 1518-19 he married Camilla, daughter of the painter Pier Maria Pennacchi. A coherent body of work executed between 1518 and 1528 has been reconstructed. Capriolo's first secure work, the Adoration of the Shepherds (Treviso, Mus. Civ.), signed and dated 1518, has a formal structure reminiscent of the late style of Giovanni Bellini, with the broader chromatic range of Palma Vecchio and a crepuscular light that recalls the Venetian works of Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo or Giovanni da Asola ( fl 1512-31). The Assumption in Treviso Cathedral, commissioned in 1520, shows, in its spiralling movement, the influence of the contemporary frescoes of Pordenone in the nearby Malchiostro Chapel. In the Legend of the Doubting Midwife (Treviso, Mus. Civ.), signed and dated 1524, the influence of Savoldo is greater than that of Palma. This is also apparent in the altarpiece of the parish church of Ponzano Veneto (Treviso), dated 1525. The portrait of Lelio Torelli (Barnard Castle, Bowes Mus.), signed and dated 1528, Capriolo's last known work, seems by contrast to reflect local models of portraiture and lies somewhere between the styles of Sebastiano Florigerio and Bernardino Licinio. Other works assigned to Capriolo include: the altarpieces of the parish churches of Cavasagra and Spercenigo, near Treviso; the Adoration of the Shepherds in the sacristy of Serravalle Cathedral at Vittorio Veneto; a fragment of a Nativity (Venice, Mus. Correr); two paintings of the Virgin and Child with Saints (Bucharest, Mus. A.; Conegliano, Mus. Civ. Castello).