<< YCBA Home Yale Center for British Art Yale Center for British Art << YCBA Home

YCBA Collections Search

 
IIIF Actions
Creator:
John Atkinson Grimshaw, 1836–1893
Title:

Whitby Harbor

Date:
1878
Medium:
Oil on board
Dimensions:
11 × 17 1/8 inches (27.9 × 43.5 cm), Frame: 14 1/8 × 20 1/4 × 1 1/2 inches (35.9 × 51.4 × 3.8 cm)
Inscription(s)/Marks/Lettering:

Signed by and dated 1878

Credit Line:
Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Michael D. Coe, Yale MAH 1968
Copyright Status:
Public Domain
Accession Number:
B2015.13
Classification:
Paintings
Collection:
Paintings and Sculpture
Subject Terms:
harbor | landscape
Access:
Not on view
Note: To make an appointment to see this work, please contact the Paintings and Sculpture department at ycba.paintings@yale.edu. Please visit the Paintings and Sculpture collections page on our website for more details.
Link:
https://collections.britishart.yale.edu/catalog/tms:72200
Export:
XML
IIIF Manifest:
JSON

The fishing town of Whitby in North Yorkshire became a favorite subject for John Atkinson Grimshaw beginning in the late 1860s with what is probably his first moonlight picture, Whitby Harbour by Moonlight (1867). The novelist Bram Stoker later chose Whitby as the place Count Dracula first set foot on English soil, in the guise of a great black dog. By the 1870s, Grimshaw was at the peak of his success and continued painting his enormously popular moonlit Whitby scenes well into the late 1880s, when he lived in Chelsea, close to Stoker. After a visit to Grimshaw’s studio, James McNeill Whistler remarked of his friend’s nocturnal townscapes, “I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures.”

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016

If you have information about this object that may be of assistance please contact us.