- Venue
- Mercer Art Gallery
- Starts
- Saturday, April 16, 2011
- Ends
- Sunday, September 4, 2011
- Address
- Swan Road, Harrogate, HG1 2SA
- Location
- Yorkshire
This is the first major exhibition in over thirty years devoted to Victorian artist John Atkinson Grimshaw, one of the most intriguing painters of his day. Over 50 major works by this celebrated self-taught artist will be on show, including many works not seen in public for decades and generously lent by private collectors. The show also aims to reveal more about the artist’s fascinating private life, uncovering new material about his family history. Curator Jane Sellars has had access to revealing new biographical material, including previously unseen early photographs of Grimshaw, of his wife and occasional model, Theodosia, and their young children. The exhibition charts Grimshaw’s career, from his early Pre-Raphaelite paintings of the 1860s, where the principal subject matter was the landscape, to the series of tiny, subtly toned oil paintings produced at the end of his life that captured the extraordinary light of sun, snow and mist on the beach, small symphonies in green and grey that link him forever with his friend and close contemporary, James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). To accompany the exhibition a new book Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight is being published by Harrogate Borough Council, supported by the Friends of the Mercer Art Gallery and the Mellon Centre for British Art.
