This painting is the last and arguably most important of a series of domestic subjects which Grimshaw executed in the 1870s. By natural inclination a landscape painter, he was inspired to paint these pictures from two very different motives: his move to Knostrop Old Hall and the example of J.J. Tissot, whose contemporary work they often recall even if their mood is a good deal less sophisticated.

Grimshaw took over the tenancy of Knostrop Old Hall, a seventeenth-century manor house two miles east of Leeds, in 1870. The move reflected his growing success as an artist and was a landmark in his career, giving him both social standing in the Leeds area and a congenially romantic environment; and the house remained his home until his death twenty-three years later. The domestic subjects which culminate in Dulce Domum are all set in either the house or the garden, and express his understandable pride in the idyllic background to life and work they represented. The other paintings in the series all date from 1875, the year before Dulce Domum was started. Summer and Spring (Robertson, op.cit., pls.36 and 1) show the artist's wife Fanny dressed in eighteenth-century costume and standing in interiors full of 'aesthetic' bric-à-brac, with glimpses of the garden through the windows. In In the Pleasaunce (Robertson, pl.44), still in eighteenth-century dress, she is seated in the garden itself; while Il Penseroso (Robertson pl.46) shows her or another woman surrounded by exotic plants in the conservatory. This is the most Tissotesque of the group as it exists, although a missing work in the series; A Question of Colour, 'might have been conceived and painted by Tissot', according to the Yorkshire Post in 1876. Again portraying a lady in a fashionable interior, and affirming the values of 'aestheticism' by its title no less than its subject, this was the picture to which ours (according to the inscription previously on the back) was 'painted as a sequel'.

Dulce Domum shows the dining-room at Knostrop, a panelled room noted for its original plaster-work ceiling and frieze. The model for the principal figure was probably Grimshaw's daughter Enid, who was twenty when the picture was finished in 1885. Appropriately, she is listening to music, which was her great interest. She had a fine contralto voice and used to sing in music festivals in Leeds, often performing songs composed by her brother Arthur. The girl at the piano is said to be her younger sister Elaine (four of the Grimshaw children were named after characters in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Elaine having a twin brother, Lancelot). She was born in 1877, a year after the picture was started, so she was only eight when it was finished although she looks rather older. She was to marry Edmund Phillips, a journalist on the Yorkshire Post, and live until 1970, providing scholars with valuable information about her father. Surrounding the two girls are abundant signs of Grimshaw's collecting activities, a plethora of objets d'art of which many - the Japanese fans, the Chinese pots filled with flowers or peacock feathers, the classical statue, the oriental embroidery covering Enid's chair and the ebonised chair at the piano - bear witness once again to the artist's 'aesthetic' taste. Indeed the picture is a microcosm of the Aesthetic Movement. The panelled walls and plasterwork evoke the 'Queen Anne' atmosphere which so many architects and designers were seeking to re-create. Enid's dress may not be eighteenth-century (like those worn by her mother in other paintings in the series), but it is undoubtedly 'aesthetic' in its uncluttered line and lack of corsetting; while Elaine, in her mob-cap, might have stepped straight out of a Kate Greenaway drawing. She would be more at home, one feels, in Bedford Park, Norman Shaw's showcase for the Queen Anne Revival, than in the environs of Leeds. 'Aesthetic' again is the picture's musical theme, for which many parallels exist: Whistler's use of terms like 'symphony' and 'nocturne' to denote his pictures' lack of literary or anecdotal reference; Burne-Jones's love of figures playing musical instruments to evoke a mood of wistful yearning; Walter Pater's famous dictum that 'all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.' Last but not least, there is the picture's colour scheme, dominated by notes of green or turquoise blue. Gilbert's 'greenery yellery, Grosvenor Gallery' from Patience comes immediately to mind; and indeed while the picture was in progress, Patience was produced (1881) and Grimshaw was invited to exhibit at the Grosvenor. The only picture he showed there, A Vestal (1885), was offered in these Rooms on 25 October 1991, lot 33.

As Alexander Robertson has observed, the inscription previously on the back strikes a rare personal note, hinting at, but not revealing, problems in the artist's private life which dogged the picture's progress. It was started after the deaths of three of his children in 1874, but spanned the financial crisis which is believed to have beset him in the late 1870s, forcing him to give up the house he had taken at Scarborough, together with his coach, horses and groom. Whatever the case, something of the stress Grimshaw was under seems to find expression in the picture's disconcerting stillness and Enid's look of wistfulness, almost regret, as she listens to her sister playing. For all its parade of household gods, Dulce Domum does more than celebrate an earthly paradise, and the title is, in a sense, ironical.
When exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885, the picture was well received. The Times claimed that 'there is hardly to be found in the exhibition such another piece of sheer painting as the dress of the lady in the foreground,' and several critics saw it as a return to Pre-Raphaelite values. The Art Journal thought it 'a bold and not altogether unsatisfactory attempt to revive the tradition of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood', while F.G. Stephens in the Athenaeum, felt that it was 'one of the most original and powerful interiors in (the) exhibition ... The splendour and intensity of the local colours ... are worthy of Mr Holman Hunt in his early days.' The picture even inspired an ode by T.W.H. Crosland, editor of the Hunslet and Holbeck News and a well known critic (partly quoted in Robertson, op.cit., p.46). When, later the same year, it was exhibited at Manchester, it was bought for #1,000 by Walter Battle, a Leeds solicitor and Town Councillor who later owned the Leeds Times. Battle was to possess over eighty examples of Grimshaw's work by the time the artist died, A Vestal, mentioned above, being another.

The picture was still missing when the Grimshaw exhibition was held in 1979-80, but since its subsequent reappearance its importance has been widely recognised. Alexander Robertson described it in 1988 as 'a tour de force of observation', noting how 'even the doorknobs ... contain gleaming reflections' and praising 'the convincing ease and naturalness' of the main figure. Within the last year it was seen in the Japan and Britain exhibition at the Barbican, where it made an essential contribution to this 'aesthetic dialogue'.

We are grateful to Alexander Robertson for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.