Career of light and shade

They will meet and stay the night at the Castle by the Sea which has superb views over the North and South Bays. Now a hotel, it was romantically named after a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by the man who built it as the family home, the women’s great-grandfather, John Atkinson Grimshaw.

They plan to spend some of their time together comparing their respective parts of the family tree whose extensive roots account for their lack of awareness about each other. Their great-grandfather had 15 children of whom eight survived. When he died in his 50s, the family split up because there was no money left.

Atkinson Grimshaw had once been the toast of Leeds, a man about town. The city saw itself reflected in his pictures and liked what it saw. He was a master of dramatic lighting effects and people relished his local scenes often depicted at dusk or under moonlight. They were usually painted with almost photographic realism and at the peak of his career he was said to be turning out a picture a week.

But when he succumbed to cancer in 1893, a newspaper obituary, in a final kick to a man who was down, sniffed, “not a few artists were doubtful whether his work could be accepted as paintings at all”.

His fashionable star was quickly eclipsed and it remained so. At an auction at Christie’s in January 1912, a pair of pictures called Sunset and Moonlight sold for one-and a half guineas, about £1.50. Five others went for 50p each. Thirty years later, a Leeds woman sent 20 Grimshaws for auction in the city. Failing to get a single bid, she took them home, chopped them up and burned them.

Post-war, his stock has risen. Earlier this year, one of his paintings fetched nearly £195,000 at Christie’s. Today his name receives its biggest boost in a long time when the first major Atkinson Grimshaw exhibition for 30 years opens in Harrogate at the Mercer Gallery.

Two-and-half years in the making, it has 60 pictures, 30 of them in private hands and not seen in public for decades.

The curator is Jane Sellars and it’s due to her detective work into the painter’s unconventional life (which he left mostly undocumented) that the cousins April and Mary have been able to meet for the first time.

“I’ve been piecing together the Atkinson Grimshaw family background,” says Jane, who has also produced a book. “There are loads of gaps in it. Because he didn’t come from the right background, he had to invent himself.

“I didn’t think we’d find anything new, but I think we have.

“Atkinson Grimshaw’s paintings are mysterious and gorgeous. He was very interested in the effects of light although he had no idea about the Impressionists, never went to Paris. It was other self-made men who liked his pictures, like Mr Stead of Stead and Simpson.”

It says something about the cultural state of early Victorian Leeds, by many accounts a dirty, disease-ridden hell-hole for the labouring poor, that a working class boy of the time had access to good visual art. It’s not clear where he found it in the days before the provision of public libraries and galleries, but he did and he overcame fierce parental resistance in the learning process.

This promising self-made painter found no encouragement at home in 9, Back Park Street. His policeman father and his shopkeeper mother were dead against art. Strict Baptists, they cracked down on their son’s fancy notions – his mother even threw his paints on the fire and turned off the gas in the evenings so he couldn’t see to work.

They found him a steady job when he was 19 as a railway clerk and he annoyed them further by quitting it after five years to paint full-time. By this time he had a wife to support – his cousin Frances Theodosia – and the beginnings of a family. He never broke with his parents, although he did convert to Roman Catholicism.

The young man made a swift name for himself exhibiting in Leeds in the 1860s. Soon he was successful enough to rent a 17th century mansion, Knostrop Hall on the east side of Leeds. It matched his ambitions but otherwise proved disastrous. Diptheria devastated his family – the hall’s bad drains were to blame.

Fascinated by photography, he sometimes used a camera obscura to project outlines onto canvases to make swift repeat images. He also tried painting over photographs, attracting censure in the days before multi-media working became respectable.

It’s the special way he had with light which makes his pictures so compelling. There’s a famous one of Leeds’s Boar Lane as evening draws on where the yellow gas light spilling out from the shop fronts and reflecting off the cobbled street delights the eye. Yet the scene also stirs feelings of poignancy and melancholy.

It was when Grimshaw was at his most prosperous that he built the Castle by the Sea. Then financial calamity overtook him, the reason never really explained. His grandson, Guy Ragland Phillips, wrote that he “overstretched his resources by backing a bill for a friend who decamped”.

He sold up in Scarborough and the family went back to Knostrop Hall while he took a studio in Chelsea for a couple of years to turn out pot boilers. The move left his long-time live-in model, Agnes Leefe, in limbo.

In the last two years of his life, he became best friends with a journalist who had just come to Leeds from Manchester to the Yorkshire Post. John Searle Ragland Phillips (later the paper’s editor) was a good listener and was sympathetic to the worries of artists because he was married to one. Known as JSR in the family, he’s remembered with special fondness for his actions in their hour of need after Grimshaw’s death. The story is that during a train journey, JSR suggested to his son Edmund that he marry Elaine Grimshaw, a girl of 16 when her father died. Edmund duly obliged. Elaine lived to the age of 94 and was April Marsden’s grandmother. “About the time I was becoming a teenager my father would talk to grannie a lot,” says April, who now lives in a village on the North York Moors. “She never said much about her dad but she remembered they had no shoes when they went to church.

“Agnes Leefe was his live-in model. His poor wife had to put up with having her in the house. He painted her as the Lady of Shallot and as a fairy. She was his muse. She got TB and the family had to nurse her until she died.

“They had two bad attacks of diptheria at Knostrop Hall. The drains were frightful. Grannie said the reason she survived was because they gave her goat’s milk.

“After Atkinson Grimshaw died, it was the Phillips side who saved their bacon. JSR helped the family out after the bankruptcy.”

Elaine has many pictures on the walls of her house. None of them are Atkinson Grimshaws. “My dad had two. He sold them to get us a house.

“I think the new exhibition is fantastic. Jane Sellars came to see me and she has put me in touch with Mary.

“Mary has done a lot of work on the family tree and I’m looking forward to meeting her at the Castle by the Sea.”

* John Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight. Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate from today to September 4, admission free. 01423 556188.