An Autumnal Glow

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 lonely 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 desire to conjure up a wistful nostalgia for the past seems to be the motivating force in paintings such as An Autumnal Glow. The detail is remarkable with a mass of intricate tracery silhouetted against the bold, golden sky, the elegant female figure stepping wearily 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 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.