A Solicitation, watercolour, 23 x 45cm, Private collection"
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John Atkinson Grimshaw (British, 1836-1893)


Two Thousand Years Ago signed 'Atkinson Grimshaw' (on the base of the marble bench, lower right)oil on canvas75.3 x 127.3cm (29 5/8 x 50 1/8in).
|ProvenanceAnon. sale, Sotheby's, London, 29 March 1984, lot 100.Owen Edgar Gallery, London.Private collection, Canada. LiteratureAlexander Robertson, Atkinson Grimshaw, Oxford, 1988, pp. 54, 58, 61 (illustrated pl. 41, pl. 47 detail).Jane Sellars (ed), Atkinson Grimshaw, Painter of Moonlight, Harrogate, 2011, p. 93.In the 1870s, Atkinson Grimshaw, by now becoming well-established as a painter of nocturnes and moonlit street and harbour scenes, experimented with a series of figurative paintings, clearly influenced by Tissot. The success of these works, such as Snowbound, Summer and Dulce Domum, led the artist to further excursions into the figurative genre, in search of a more sophisticated and wealthy audience. Spending much of his time in London during this period, Grimshaw would have seen Tissot's work at Agnew's exhibitions; he would have also encountered the work of Alma-Tadema, the great master of depicting the domesticity of ancient Rome. These bright, colourful and highly-detailed visions of the ancient world were hugely popular among Victorian collectors, and were perfectly analogous to Grimshaw's techniques. As Alexander Robertson notes, 'it was in these pictures that Grimshaw's early training in truth to nature and close observation paid off as he became adept at capturing the surface textures of household objects and the sheen and satin of marble panels'.1Robertson further notes, that, while some of Grimshaw's Tadema-inspired works were little more than pastiches, the present lot, painted in 1878, was 'the most successful... of this genre....Here Grimshaw's figures (often a problem for him, with his lack of professional training) are convincingly worked out, as is the overall detail, bathed in the brilliant light that gives the painting its feeling of airiness'.2Grimshaw clearly grew inspiration for Two Thousand Years Ago from Alma-Tadema's work Pleading (1876, now in the collection of the Guildhall Art Gallery, London), a glorious meditation on frustrated love, set against a sparkling Mediterranean sea (a small watercolour version of this work, A Solicitation was sold in these rooms, 1 March 2017, lot 32, fig 1). In Grimshaw's composition the arrangement of the figures is reversed, and the coastline in replaced by the dense branches of a tree, painted with the artist's usual meticulous detail. Both works retain the same sense of unrequited desire, the male figure prostate before a seemingly uninterested female.The work would most likely have been painted in Grimshaw's studio at 'The Castle-by-the-sea', the house the family rented in Scarborough. Edwina Ehrman notes that the borders of the studio floor were decorated with 'a printed, tessellated marble floor-cloth' and that the artist 'probably used floor cloths simulating mosaic flooring when he painted Two Thousand Years Ago'.31 Alexander Robertson, 'Atkinson Grimshaw: Life and Work', published in Jane Sellars (ed), Atkinson Grimshaw, Painter of Moonlight, Harrogate, 2011, p. 12.2 Alexander Robertson, Atkinson Grimshaw, Oxford, 1988, p. 58.3 Edwina Ehrman, 'Artistic Interiors', published in Jane Sellars (ed), Atkinson Grimshaw, Painter of Moonlight, Harrogate, 2011, p. 93.