John Atkinson Grimshaw - A moonlit evening, 1880

 

John Atkinson Grimshaw - A moonlit evening, 1880

When John Atkinson Grimshaw married his wife, Theodosia Hubbard, they lived in a very small house in Leeds, and although he longed to paint, they had insufficient money to allow him to give up his job working on the railways. In the evenings, he enjoyed going for walks with his wife through the darkened streets and woodlands of the Leeds suburbs, and then inspired by this he would go home and paint. These records of moonlit walks now constitute the essence of Grimshaw's popularity and reputation as a painter. By 1861, he was successful enough as an artist to give up his daytime job and devote his career entirely to painting.

He was fascinated by the contrast between moonlight and artificial light and in his urban scenes, he experiments with the varied effects of the moon, the light glowing from inside houses, and the reflections of moonlight on the wet road. A Moonlit Evening is a wonderful example of the unique genre which Grimshaw created. Grimshaw specialised in the depiction of moonlit walks, shadowed streets and rain-washed roads, to make atmospheric compositions which were highly individual to the artist. The house in this painting is probably fictitious, to the artist's own design, based on a combination of styles which he observed and absorbed. He often included a solitary figure which added a sense of contemplation and ambiguity to the scene, inviting the viewer to imagine a narrative for the scene, to consider the thoughts and feelings of the person, and to dwell on their walk on a lost and lonely night. It implies both a sense of isolation, but simultaneously of freedom, in the abandonment of conventions for a single female to be wandering alone in the dark, accompanied only by her thoughts, and this is an appealing romantic notion, probably inspired by Grimshaw's love of Lord Alfred Tennyson's yearning poetry. via