Hull Docks at Night, John Atkinson Grimshaw
“ ‘The work of Atkinson Grimshaw is valuable and unique in several
respects. He made a great popular success out of that amalgam of
Pre-Raphaelite sentiment, nature and industry that dominated the culture
of northern England in the later nineteenth century. His work is our
only visual equivalent to the great epics of industrial change, the
novels of Gaskell and Dickens.’ (David Bromfield, Atkinson Grimshaw 1836-1893, exhibition catalogue, 1979-1980, p. 5)John Atkinson Grimshaw celebrated the age of industry, commerce and
conspicuous wealth in a series of paintings in which moonlight and
lamplight contrast with one another and skeletal trees or ship’s rigging
are interchangeable. In the present picture of the docks at Hull with
the sailed-barges and steamers, horse-drawn hansoms make their way along
the wet cobbled road which reflects the gaslight of the shop windows
that face the dock. A young woman and her child are hurrying across the
road whilst on the opposite pavement another woman stops to talk to an
organ-grinder silhouetted against the glow of a street-lamp.Bromfield has interpreted Grimshaw’s port scenes as ‘icons of
commerce and the city. They are remarkable in that they record the
contemporary port’s role within Victorian life; they appealed directly
to Victorian pride and energy. They also show that same darkness, a
mysterious lack of complete experience of the subject which one
associates with large cities and big business, which Dickens recounts so
well in Bleak House and Great Expectations and for which Grimshaw’s
moonlight became a perfect metaphor.’ (ibid Bromfield, p. 15). The
number of ships-masts visible in the present picture demonstrates how
busy Hull’s docks were in the late nineteenth century when it was one of
the busiest ports in the country. The imposing three-domed building in
the present picture was the Dock Offices (it now houses Hull Maritime
Museum), the headquarters of the Hull Dock Company in Queen Victoria
Square. This magnificent example of Victorian architecture was built in
1871 and was relatively new when it was painted by Grimshaw which
demonstrates the modernity of his cityscapes. The monument to the left
is that of William Wilberforce, the Yorkshire MP and anti-slavery
campaigner. The monument, built in 1834 comprised a ninety foot Doric
column upon which stood a twelve foot statue of Wilberforce. It stood
for almost a hundred years at the edge of Princes Dock until the 1930s
when the dock was closed and the monument was moved. On the left of the
composition, behind the skeletal rigging of the sail ships is the
silhouette of St John’s Church, now demolished. ” S