John Atkinson Grimshaw

Grimshaw was a great admirer of Tennyson, and the historical, stately homes that feature in his works from the 1870’s and 1880’s are thought to have been inspired in part by the poet’s Locksley Hall of 1842:

Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet ‘tis early morn:

Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon the bugle horn.

‘Tis the place, and all around it, as of old, the curlews call,

Dreary gleams about the moorland flying over Locksley Hall;

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,

And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest,

Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to the West.

Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade,

Glitter like a swarms of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid

                 From Locksley Hall, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Grimshaw constructed his fantastical rural manors from a creative source similar to Tennyson’s poetry. Both the poems and the paintings concern the passage of time, the influence of science over human actions and the changing cycles of nature. In both genres these aged suburban houses are presented as comforting locations for which all these aspects of life are contemplated (See David Broomfield, Atkinson Grimshaw, 1836-1893, Leeds City Art Gallery, 1979-80, p.18). 

Though often interpreted as nostalgic references to a less industrialized landscape, the romantic, ruined manors were also symbolic carriers of a more hopeful Victorian spirit. As David Broomfield wrote, “to dismiss these images as nostalgic is to avoid their ambivalence, the aspirations they embodied for a future as magical as the past and the poignancy of the sense of loss they express.” (ibid)