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.”
Text: Yale Center for British Art.
