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Lot Essay
One of the most enduring subjects created by Atkinson Grimshaw is the suburban lane with its high walls, trees, a partly hidden mansion and a single figure, usually female, walking along a leaf strewn road.
The compositional motif was first created in the early 1870s when Grimshaw and his family had moved to Knostrop Hall, a seventeenth century manor house by the River Aire on the eastern edge of Leeds. The romantic in Grimshaw responded readily to such surroundings; his own fascination with poetry and legend can be seen in the naming of his children after characters from Tennyson's Idylls of the King.
The desire to conjure up a wistful nostalgia for the past seems to be the motivating force in paintings such as Sixty Years Ago. The composition is on a grand scale, comparable to paintings of the Thames and Leeds Bridge. The detail is quite remarkable with reflections showing in the puddled lane, a mass of intricate tracery silhouetted against the winter sky, the elegant female figure stepping warily across the muddy roadway, the whole scene bathed in a sharp clear light. What Grimshaw achieves is a fine sense of atmosphere, poetry, and mood made up of a very simple components; the enduring fascination of such paintings is their apparent simplicity creating a view back in time, to a golden age that never was.
We are grateful to Alex Robertson for providing us with the above catalogue entry.
The compositional motif was first created in the early 1870s when Grimshaw and his family had moved to Knostrop Hall, a seventeenth century manor house by the River Aire on the eastern edge of Leeds. The romantic in Grimshaw responded readily to such surroundings; his own fascination with poetry and legend can be seen in the naming of his children after characters from Tennyson's Idylls of the King.
The desire to conjure up a wistful nostalgia for the past seems to be the motivating force in paintings such as Sixty Years Ago. The composition is on a grand scale, comparable to paintings of the Thames and Leeds Bridge. The detail is quite remarkable with reflections showing in the puddled lane, a mass of intricate tracery silhouetted against the winter sky, the elegant female figure stepping warily across the muddy roadway, the whole scene bathed in a sharp clear light. What Grimshaw achieves is a fine sense of atmosphere, poetry, and mood made up of a very simple components; the enduring fascination of such paintings is their apparent simplicity creating a view back in time, to a golden age that never was.
We are grateful to Alex Robertson for providing us with the above catalogue entry.