John Atkinson Grimshaw

John Ruskin identified the improved British ship-of-the-line as "the most honorable thing that man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced."  But he was not convinced it was a fitting topic for great art, calling the expanding ports it engendered a "New Forest of mast and yard that follows the windings up the Thames," (as quoted in David Bromfield, Atkinson Grimshaw, W. Yorkshire, 1979, p. 15).

Grimshaw was fascinated by these "New Forests" and the changes these large, always bustling ports wrought in towns such as Liverpool, Glasgow and Hull.  David Bromfield explains Grimshaw’s method: "The great ports are nearly always seen at dusk…However it is the mechanism of the port, its role in the life of the city which interested Grimshaw, that is why he includes legible shop signs and advertisements in his images.  They are there to remind us that the port is part of the urban process…he does not romanticize what he sees.  Grimshaw found an appropriate time and atmosphere to make [the romance] perceptible."(Bromfield, p. 15) 

As Britain's Colonial economy grew and Victorians bought more goods shipped from exotic places, the shops along the quay became ever busier later into the night, and the mass market advertising age was born.  At right, one sees a billboard featuring advertisements for Singer Sewing Machines and Cadbury Cocoa, among others.  Though highly atmospheric with it ghostly masts, and faces barely illuminated by street lights (and in one man’s case, by his lit cigarette), this image shows a working port that Grimshaw wished to document accurately.

Grimshaw's dock views were mostly painted in the 1880's, when he struck up a great friendship with James McNeil Whistler, also famous for Thames views.  Grimshaw marked his copy of James McNeil Whistler's famous Ten O’Clock Lecture (1885) to underscore a set of lines written by his friend.  These lines describe perfectly Grimshaw’s mastery of this evocative subject: "And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, fairy-land is before us..."