John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893)

Executed in 1893, the present picture is one of a small group that can be seen as the summation of Grimshaw's lifetime exploration of the varying effects of light. With a restricted palette, and startling economy of means, a ship is depicted against a horizon, punctuated by the twinkling of distant lights. The influence of Grimshaw’s friend and neighbour James McNeil Whistler's famous series of Nocturnes has clearly been absorbed, and yet the style remains distinctively Grimshaw's own. So accomplished were these nocturnal scenes that they led Whistler to remark upon seeing them ‘I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlight pictures’.