A fortune at last for Grimshaw’s moody visions of Yorkshire

But now three of Leeds painter John Atkinson Grimshaw’s oil paintings are set to sell at auction for almost half a million pounds.

It is a turn around in fortunes in the story of the artist, who left less than £1,000 in his will when he died in 1893. Atkinson Grimshaw was born in Leeds in 1836. His policeman father pushed him into a career as a clerk at the Great Northern Railway Company, but he gave it up at the age of 24 to begin a career as an artist.

The pieces being auctioned at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday next week are in his classic style, and were painted not long after the mysterious financial crisis in the late 1870s which forced Grimshaw to give up his seaside home, Castle-by-the-Sea, at Scarborough and return to his native Leeds.

The first, Prince’s Dock Hull, painted in 1882, is expected to sell for between £100,000 and £150,000, while the 1880s painting, Golden Autumn, is valued at between £150,000 and £250,000, and finally A Moonlit Street After Rain, from 1881, is set to fetch between £120,000 and £180,000.