A young woman reclines upon a green-upholstered sofa, her pale silk gown pooling across the cushions, her elbow rests on a pillow, her cheek upon her gloved hand, her gaze drifts past the picture plane. An embroidered kimono of black silk, worked in gold with scenes of Japanese figures, spills over the sofa’s arm. Behind her, ranged in a frieze against a small-patterned Aesthetic wallpaper, stand five vases, interleaved with open Japanese paper fans. The painting was executed at Knostrop Old Hall, the seventeenth-century manor on the Temple Newsam Estate that John Atkinson Grimshaw had occupied since 1870. It belongs to a small and remarkable sequence of interiors conceived at the high noon of British Aestheticism.

Born in Leeds, Grimshaw abandoned a clerkship with the Great Northern Railway in 1861 to paint, against the disapproval of his Baptist parents. Self-taught, he grounded his early practice in Ruskin’s doctrines and the jewel-toned naturalism of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, absorbing particular lessons from the Leeds landscapist John William Inchbold. He became a master of richly atmospheric moonlit scenes and golden dawns, and commercial success followed. Whistler, tradition has it, confessed that he had considered himself the inventor of the nocturne until he saw ‘Grimmy’s’ moonlit pictures. Less celebrated, though more daring, is the small group of figural interiors painted between 1875 and 1885, in which the decorative choreography of his own rooms became both stage and subject. The present work ranks among the most fully realised of that group.

Such optical refinement owes much to Grimshaw’s interest in photography and his documented use of the camera obscura; he and his son Arthur Edmund later joined the Leeds Photographic Society. Grimshaw built his forms in fine strata upon a thinly grounded canvas, frequently scumbled or glazed, so that the surface acquires a luminous, enamel-like density. Contemporaries sometimes complained that his paintings showed ‘no marks of handling or brushwork’. One can count the pleats of the gown and trace the details of the mirror frame; yet at two or three paces the image resolves into a symphony of hues. This double operation, meticulous in proximity and atmospheric at remove, is the signature of his finest work.

The figure is most likely Frances Theodosia Grimshaw, known as Fanny, the painter’s cousin, whom he married in 1856 and who served as his principal subject throughout the Knostrop interiors. She is the model in Dulce Domum begun 1876 and completed 1885 (Collection of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber). Placing Fanny in repose rather than at a domestic occupation, and with a heightened attention to fashion, reveals the influence of the paintings of James Tissot, the French painter who made his name in Victorian London, who Grimshaw likely did not know personally but whose work he had clearly seen in various exhibitions and printed reproductions.

The word ‘reverie’ had acquired new currency during the 1870s, denoting a state in which beauty might be absorbed without the intrusion of narrative or moral instruction. It ties in with the Aesthetic Movement of the period, closely associated with Whistler, Albert Moore and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with its emphasis on beauty and ‘Art for Art’s sake’. Whistler’s Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (1864, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington) is a ready comparison as Tissot’s Young Women Looking at Japanese Articles (1869, Cincinnati Art Museum) – both revealing the allure and fashion for Eastern objects permeating Western culture at the time.

Grimshaw reflects this appeal at Knostrop which, as Edwina Ehrman noted: ‘in the 1870s the artist’s house was not just an expression of material success. It was also seen as a measure of the owner’s aesthetic sensibility and artistic credentials.’ (Jane Sellars (ed.), Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight, 2011). The small quartet of Knostrop interiors — Il Penseroso (1875), In the Pleasaunce (1875), the present canvas, and Dulce Domum, constitutes the artist’s most sustained meditation on the domestic ideal, charting the rooms and garden of a single house and a single marriage over the decade of his greatest commercial success.

The canvas was painted at a poignant moment. By May 1878 Grimshaw stood at the summit of his career, renting Castle-by-the-Sea at Scarborough as a second residence. The following year, a financial reversal forced him to relinquish that coastal retreat; by the middle of the next decade, he was maintaining a Chelsea studio far from Fanny and the children. On the reverse of Dulce Domum he would later inscribe the Latin tag ‘LABOR OMNIA VINCIT’ and the note ‘mostly painted under great difficulties’; no such melancholy attaches to the present work, which records Knostrop before debt and bereavement had shadowed it. It stands as an exquisite example within Grimshaw’s oeuvre and the wider Aesthetic Movement, which was such a fruitful stimulus for some of the most celebrated artworks of the period.