John Atkinson Grimshaw 1836-1893

A. G. McCrae;
Christie's, 16 May 1988, lot 151;
London, Richard Green;
Private collection

STRUCTURE This picture is relined and in very good condition. CATALOGUE COMPARISON The illustration is broadly representative. PAINT SURFACE The surface is sound with clear colouring and fine detail throughout. There are areas of fine craquelure in the lower right part of the composition but the paint surface appears to be stable. The picture is clean and ready to hang. UNDER ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT There is an area of retouching in the centre of the sky. FRAME This picture is contained in a moulded plaster frame.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The industrial cities of Britain and their commercial growth were the source of immense inspiration for John Atkinson Grimshaw, whether he was painting the suburban villas of the Leeds' factory and mill owners or the shopping streets and docks of Liverpool, Whitby and Glasgow. Grimshaw celebrated the age of industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth in a series of paintings in which moonlight and lamplight contrast with one another and skeletal trees or ship's rigging are interchangeable. Often there is a suggestion of social division; of a servant girl making her way home through puddled streets before the imposing facade of her master's home, or a homeward-bound farmer wending through a suburban street. In the present picture of the docks on the Clyde in Glasgow, Grimshaw made the social contrast particularly apparent and the picture could be divided into two halves; the left half depicting the road menders and the merchant ships of the working class city whilst the right half is inhabited by the more affluent and elegantly dressed upper classes bathed in the warm light radiating from the tantalising shop windows. The light emanating from the interiors of the shops illuminates an array of pipes, cigars and other smoking apparatus in the window of MacInyre's tobacconist and the watches and clocks displayed in the window of a jewellers. In front of a wine merchant's shop a woman in a fur muffler appears to be attempting to persuade her elegantly-dressed male companion to look into the window of the shop at something that has caught her eye whilst another women has been approached by a pair of street urchins. The clock shows that it is a little after a quarter past seven and the shoppers are already making their way home in the hansom cabs that line the street. In contrast, work goes on for the road menders amid the drizzle and mist with the only warmth from a burning brazier.

Grimshaw began to expand the scope of his subjects in the early 1880s, beginning a series of paintings of urban street scenes and docks set in the evening light for which he is best known. His growing popularity, particularly with art collectors in the northern urban centres, encouraged him to paint the industrial ports and harbours of Liverpool, Hull, Scarborough, Whitby and Glasgow. Bromfield has interpreted Grimshaw's port scenes as 'icons of commerce and the city. They are remarkable in that they record the contemporary port's role within Victorian life; they appealed directly to Victorian pride and energy. They also show that same darkness, a mysterious lack of complete experience of the subject which one associates with large cities and big business, which Dickens recounts so well in Bleak House and Great Expectations and for which Grimshaw's moonlight became a perfect metaphor.' (David Bromfield, Atkinson Grimshaw 1836-1893, exhibition catalogue, 1979-1980, p. 15)

'The work of Atkinson Grimshaw is valuable and unique in several respects. He made a great popular success out of that amalgam of Pre-Raphaelite sentiment, nature and industry that dominated the culture of northern England in the later nineteenth century. His work is our only visual equivalent to the great epics of industrial change, the novels of Gaskell and Dickens.' (Ibid Bromfield, p. 5)

The Broomielaw Quay had been the harbour of Glasgow since the end of the seventeenth century and was named after the Brumelaw Croft, a stretch of land between Anderson Quay and Victorian Bridge. In the nineteenth century following remodelling by Thomas Telford Broomielaw became a busy dock and was also the place that many Glaswegians left for their holidays with passengers alighting from the world famous Henry Bell's Comet, the first commercial steam ferry and from the Clutha Ferries that ran a half hourly service between Victoria Bridge and Whiteinch stopping at the Broomielaw Quay on their journey.  The ferries brought passengers from the various neighbouring shipyards and docks and operated until 1903; the opening of the subway underground in 1896 and the introduction of the tram system in 1901 saw the demise of the ferry system.

The present picture is a version of a composition that Grimshaw painted on several occasions, depicting the road bordered by a row of shops and houses facing the docks at Brommielaw in Glasgow. A variant of the present picture entitled Shipping on the Clyde dated 1881 was sold in these rooms (13 December 2005, lot 1) and another is reproduced in Alexander Robertson's book Atkinson Grimshaw (p. 75).