John Atkinson Grimshaw, View of Leeds from Woodhouse Ridge (1868), courtesy of Leeds Galleries and Museums Bought with the aid of grants from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, The Art Fund, the Leeds Art Fund [Patricia Hurst Fund], the Friends of Leeds City Museums, The Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, and with assistance from Richard Green Gallery, 2012

Curator’s Talk: What’s in a title? Hidden Meaning in Atkinson Grimshaw’s 1868 View of Leeds

What does this watercolour urban landscape tell us about the developing 19^th century city, and its encroachment on nature?

Join curator Nigel Walsh for a closer look at Atkinson Grimshaw’s ‘View from Woodhouse Ridge’ (1868), which appears to signal a key moment in Leeds’s rapid industrialisation. The talk will suggest that behind this apparent bucolic scene lies an intimate portrayal of his developing native city by the artist, which in a recent contemporary account, had been damned as England’s dirtiest. The talk also serves as a prelude to the forthcoming exhibition ‘Don’t Lets Ask For the Moon: Nocturnes and Atkinson Grimshaw’, at Leeds Art Gallery later this autumn. 

Nigel Walsh is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Leeds Art Gallery, with responsibility for the gallery’s permanent art collection. The forthcoming exhibition ‘Don’t Lets Ask For the Moon: Nocturnes and Atkinson Grimshaw’ will bring together Grimshaw’s nocturnal pictures with evocative works by five contemporary artists.