painter of moonlight

I went up to London today.  I was still feeling sufficiently coldy that if I hadn't already arranged to meet some former colleagues for lunch I probably wouldn't have chosen to go today, but I wanted to see them, and it's mean to people who have gone to the trouble of organising something like that to blow them out at the last minute unless you have a very good excuse.  Week two of a cold doesn't really count.

Happily the trains were running smoothly, so I didn't end up spending half an hour standing around Colchester station, and I had time to call in at the Guildhall Art Gallery.  This has been running an exhibition since last September of works by a Victorian painter, Atkinson Grimshaw, which I'd been vaguely meaning to see and not got round to it.  Since it finishes in five day's time, if I didn't go today I wasn't going to, and an exhibition in Gresham Street fitted in nicely with lunch in Clerkenwell.  Atkinson Grimshaw was very popular in his day, and so went the way of Victorian painters in much of the twentieth century, becoming wildly unfashionable to the point of derision.  Then he began to come back into favour, and the last time Christies sold one it went for £169,250.  I don't know much about Victorian painters, but liked the sound him when I read a review in one of the papers.  Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight.

He was a self-taught artist, born in Leeds, and Leeds City Art Gallery still has one of the largest public collections of his works.  He painted northern scenes, of streets and harbours and landscapes, and big houses half hidden by leafless trees.  It always seemed to be November in the north.  In his forties, by then a commercially successful painter, he moved to London and painted more streets, and views of the Thames.  By then it always seemed to be night, around the time of the full moon.  His paintings are smooth and glossy, every leaf in place, no trace of brushwork.  His palette contains umpteen shades of greenish blue and pale gold.  And I really liked them.  I didn't feel I was gazing into the soul of humanity, or that a great spiritual truth was being revealed to me.  Atkinson Grimshaw was no Rembrandt.

It's just that I like Prussian blue harbours and moonlit water.  I like winter.  I like melancholy views of big Victorian houses lurking behind leafless trees, and dishevelled gardens strewn with dead leaves.  I've been to Whitby and Scarborough, and can imagine the horror of standing at the mouth of Whitby harbour at night watching as a ship founders (there was a strong onshore wind blowing when we were there and the entrance to the harbour looked beyond terrifying, even in daylight).  I can empathise with the vicarious thrill of watching the Scarborough spa burn down.  I've always had a weakness for rain on cobblestones, and I like bridges and riverbanks.  I suggested to a friend last autumn, when we were looking for an art exhibition to visit, that looking at Atkinson Grimshaw might be a sort of guilty pleasure, like eating a big box of chocolates while reading something by Philippa Gregory and knowing that it was not Middlemarch.  The suggestion was rejected and we went somewhere else instead.  But that is exactly what looking at Atkinson Grimshaw is like.  I'm glad I didn't miss it.

The Guildhall Art Gallery has a permanent collection of (I think mostly Victorian) art as well, and in the basement are the remains of a Roman amphitheatre, which you can go down and walk around.  I didn't due to lack of time, and had to content myself with peering at it through a viewing slit next to the cloakroom.  However, entry to the permanent collection and amphitheatre is free, and so are the special exhibitions, if you have got a national art pass.  I've just sent off for one (not in time for Atkinson Grimshaw) so more of that anon.