John Atkinson Grimshaw

In the late 1860s, Grimshaw experienced a steady rise in popularity, which was fuelled by the support of prominent businessmen in the artist's hometown of Leeds.  By the end of the decade, Grimshaw was able to sell his works to an eager and expanding audience for £125 an oil painting.  With this increased fortune, Grimshaw moved to Knostrop Old Hall, a Jacobean mansion just outside Leeds, steps from the river Aire.  The Hall was built in the mid 17th Century and was once the home to the Parliamentarian Adam Baynes.  Grimshaw lived there from 1870, the date of this painting, until his death in 1893.  The move to Knostrop represented not only a new turn in fortune for the artist, but also signalled a change in his painting style.  The Hall, in a romanticized form, appears repeatedly among Grimshaw's paintings, and evokes a poetic mood.  The nostalgic vision of fallen leaves, an empty archway bathed in light, the moss-covered garden walls and the dark windows of this grand edifice transforms the artist's home into an emblem of a bygone era.

The artist's studio upon his death held a copy of Peter F. Robinson's Vetruvius Brittanicus of 1847, which contained images of Hardwicke Hall and Hatfield House, among others.  The Grimshaw scholar David Bromley theorizes that these volumes, with their large folio engravings of Britain's most august buildings, provided Grimshaw with images of some of the architectural details such as gables, chimneys and cupolas that he used to embellish Knostrop Hall.  An 1890 photograph of the house shows a very attractive but not nearly as Romantic or mysterious a facade (Fig. 1).  The house appears much sturdier as well, without any of the sense of ruin seen in the artist's vision of his home.  Grimshaw's desire to return to the values of the past reflected the values of Victorian England, and only enhanced his enormous popularity.