John Atkinson Grimshaw – View of Heath Street by Night

“Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth… Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. (…) Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. (…) Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest…”

(Charles Dickens, Bleak House)

John Atkinson Grimshaw, View of Heath Street by Night, 1882

I still remember vividly the fascination that I had with the nocturnal paintings of the Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw when I first discovered them a few years ago, actually, almost a decade ago. I was quite speechless at just how mesmerisingly atmospheric they were and these days I am rediscovering their magic and all these raw and potent sensations of beauty that I had initially experienced are also coming back to me. I gaze at this painting, “View of Heath Street by Night”, and I think; what beauty, what music, what poetry in it… It is so much more than an oil on canvas painting; it is a mood, a feeling.

The “nocturne” painting shows the corner of the Heath Street in London on a full-moon night. A lady dressed in a typically 1882 narrow attire stopped for a moment to open, or close, her umbrella. The rain has perhaps just ended and the pavements are glossy and wet. She is a solitary figure but as the street meanders, and our eye follows its curve towards the left, we see that she is not completely alone. There are more dark figures on the left as well as carriages, they all seem frozen, or at least moving slowly, greamily, mournfully… The most exciting element in this and in many other nocturnes by Grimshaw is the element of light in the darkness of the night. In his countryside landscapes the only source of light is the moon. But in this urban streetscene of late Victorian London the light comes from many sources; there is indeed a moon, full moon, seen through the bare branches, shining up there in the sky, but the light is also coming from the gas-lit street lamps and how wonderfully Grimshaw captures their golden reflections on the wet pavements and cobble streets. There is also the yellow glow from the windows, here and there, but towards the right side of the street more windows are dark and there are also more trees with bare branches. It all seems uninviting and spooky. All is dark and wet in the autumnal twilight of the year.

Perhaps the best compliment to Grimshaw’s nocturnes is the compliment from a man who was been keen to give compliments, the American ex-patriate John McNeill Whistler who famously said: “I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures.”