John Atkinson Grimshaw

The Pool of London, with its bustling shipping traffic and mysterious warehouses held a particular attraction for John Atkinson Grimshaw.  In the present painting the artist examines the Pool employing as his focal point London Bridge, whose five stone arches create a picturesque silhouette.  Built between 1823 and 1831, it was completed by Sir John Rennie according to his father’s design and opened by King William IV and Queen Adelaide.  This London Bridge had replaced its medieval predecessor, which dated from the thirteenth century, and in turn was replaced in the 1960s.  The nineteenth century London Bridge still survives, however.  Robert McCulloch, an oil and chainsaw magnate, bought the bridge from the British Government in 1968 and transported it stone by stone to Lake Havasu City, Arizona where reconstruction was completed in 1971.

Grimshaw's first London views were painted in the 1880s and were instantly popular with his patrons.  These pictures may be seen as the visual counterparts to the great literary descriptions of the new industrialized city in the novels of Charles Dickens.  In the present picture, Grimshaw brilliantly blends old and new.  The reassuring dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral reminds the viewer of a stable past, and sailing vessels whose design had not changed dramatically for a century lie nestled into an industrialized London replete with chimneys.

Grimshaw was not the only painter drawn to London’s port.  Grimshaw owned a copy of James McNeil Whistler’s Ten O’clock Lecture in which he underlined a phrase that describes both artists’ paintings perfectly, “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 tall chimneys become campanile, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, fairy-land is before us…” (C. Wood, n.p.)  Whistler returned the compliment, and said of Grimshaw’s achievements, “I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures”.

The picture offered here is inscribed on the back with the date 1884 and “Knostrop Hall”, the Jacobean mansion just outside Leeds, that Grimshaw had bought fourteen years earlier and would occupy until his death in 1893.  The artist used the inscription on most of his major pictures of the 1880s as the hall represented Grimshaw’s enormous artistic, financial, and social success.