Roundhay Lake
June 28, 2011
Roundhay Lake, John Atkinson Grimshaw
— Comments —
Alex writes:
Thanks for posting the Atkinson Grimshaw painting on your blog.
Several of Atkinson Grimshaw’s atmospheric pictures were painted in the Roundhay district of Leeds, Yorkshire. Some are evocative moonlit scenes of vaguely menacing houses and lonely lanes in the neighbourhood near Roundhay Park. This particular painting of Roundhay Lake, brings back memories of the days when I used to go boating there. I was a student at Leeds University at the time, and I hadn’t a care in the world.
Roundhay was an ‘upmarket’ residential area in the Victorian period when Grimshaw was active. It’s now a shabby locality with many rundown large houses and gardens gone to seed.
I once made a ‘pilgrimage’ to Atkinson Grimshaw’s undistinguished little home in Cliff Road, Leeds.
Laura writes:
Grimshaw could make a puddle beautiful and haunting if he wanted to, but this lake, painted sometime between 1872 and the painter’s death in 1893, is especially beautiful.
I have been reading John Ruskin’s commentary on modern landscape paintings. In Modern Painters, Vol. III, Chapt. 16, he wrote of the contrast between modern landscapes and the portrayal of nature in medieval art, which was marked by clarity and color:
We turn our eyes, therefore, as boldly and as quickly as may be, from these serene fields and skies of medieval art, to the most characteristic examples of modern landscape. And, I believe, the first thing that will strike us, or that ought to strike us, is their cloudiness.
Out of perfect light and motionless air, we find ourselves on a sudden brought under sombre skies, and into drifting wind; and, with fickle sunbeams flashing in our face, or utterly drenched with sweep of rain, we are reduced to track the changes of the shadows on the grass, or watch the rents of twilight through angry cloud. And we find that whereas all the pleasure of the medieval was in stability, definiteness and luminousness, we are expected to rejoice in darkness, and triumph in mutability; to lay the foundation of happiness in things which momentarily change or fade; and to expect the utmost satisfaction and instruction from what is impossible to arrest, and difficult to comprehend.
Unconsciously, I picked a painting that illustrates Ruskin’s point. Grimshaw’s paintings make us “triumph in mutability.”
Laura adds:
Hermes Westbury, at the blog Victorian/Edwardian Paintings, writes:
It was the remote mystery of Roundhay that attracted Grimshaw who found in the wilderness of the park and the haunting beauty of its ruins and the silent solitude of the lake, the same enigmatic beauty he had painted in the lonely suburban streets and faded glories of manor gardens of Leeds, where ivy and dry leaves veil the golden landscape. In the present picture Grimshaw captured the evening glory of the shadows and sunset reflected in the waters of the thirty-three acre lake which had been built in just two years by soldiers that had returned from the Napoleonic wars and thus named Waterloo Lake. A lone and graceful swan creates scale within the otherwise unoccupied landscape.
Grimshaw loved the natural beauty of Roundhay but also recognised the ancient serenity of its woods, which in the thirteenth century had been the hunting grounds of the DeLacy family of Pontefract Castle. Roundhay remains a public park and is now well regarded by the Leeds residents and the wildlife that is now protected within its boundaries. Flocks of mute swans still nest on Waterloo Lake as they did in Grimshaw’s day and the scene has changed very little since Grimshaw painted it and since DeLacy rode through the trees hunting wild boar.
Alex writes:
After reading your observations I followed the link and read Hermes Westbury’s eloquent appreciation. I wish it were otherwise, but the romantic vision of Roundhay Lake, as seen by Grimshaw, has been tarnished in modern times.
I haven’t been to Roundhay Park for many years – not since quitting Leeds a couple of years after graduating at the university. But from what I hear, some trails in the park aren’t safe nowadays – not even during the daytime. After dark, it would be folly to linger there. It’s the familiar story of vandalism, mugging, etc. I won’t elaborate except to remark that a canker at the heart of our civilization is evident almost everywhere – if you’re a person who notices such things.
