A negative reaction
COLLECTING: Cheating? A great Yorkshire artist upset traditionalists by painting over photographs. John Vincent reports.
POT anything unusual about this painting by John Atkinson Grimshaw? No? Perhaps that’s not surprising, because it looks very much like many of his other bustling, moody, gaslit scenes of urban Britain in the Victorian age.
But there is one major difference not immediately obvious in the 12in by 18in oil depicting St Ann’s Square in Manchester... and at the time it set traditionalists spluttering with indignation. For the Leeds-born artist, whose work nowadays regularly fetches six-figure sums, came close to what some might call cheating – by painting over a photograph of the scene.
He was interested in the new medium of photography and in his early years sometimes used these images as an aide-memoire for close examination of landscapes. In later life, however, he occasionally went one stage further by using a camera obscura to project outlines onto oil canvas.
Grimshaw, who for a while belonged to Leeds Photographic Society, retained his powers until his premature death from cancer in 1893, aged 57, so quite why such a talented artist chose this means of executing a painting is open to question. But an unexplained financial crisis in later life left him short of money and he may have hit on the idea so he could produce pictures at a faster rate.
The unusual technique shocked many art historians and the small number of paintings where the paint was applied over a photographic base do not produce high prices at auction. In St Ann’s Square, Manchester, the ghostly photographic images of the buildings are especially visible under the rows of shops to the right of centre and it was accordingly afforded a pre-sale estimate of £1,200£1,800 at Bonhams, London. It exceeded those modest expectations, selling to “a well known Yorkshire institution” for £6,000 (including premium).
At the other end of the scale, two of Grimshaw’s more celebrated paintings, executed without photographic shortcuts, are expected to fetch six-figures at Sotheby’s on Wednesday. Golden Autumn, depicting a lone female figure walking down a road bathed in the last light of evening, is listed at £150,000£250,000 and his moonlit Prince’s Dock, Hull, dated 1882, has a guide price of £100,000-£150,000.
At the same Sotheby’s sale, Scarborough-born Frederic, Lord Leighton’s portrait, Catarina, an oliveskinned Italian model dressed in a traditional Campagna smock-skirt, with amber beads at her throat and jasmine flowers in her hair is listed at £100,000-£150,000.