John Atkinson Grimshaw was a Victorian-era artist, characterized as a "remarkable and imaginative painter", who was known for his city scenes and landscapes.

He was born September 1836 in Leeds. After building up a portfolio of drawing room and exterior paintings such as Dulce Domum (1855), in 1861 he departed from his first job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway to pursue a career in art. He began exhibiting in 1862, under the patronage of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, with paintings mainly of birds, fruit, and blossoms. His early paintings were signed "JAG," "J. A. Grimshaw," or "John Atkinson Grimshaw," though he finally settled on "Atkinson Grimshaw." Grimshaw's primary influence was the Pre-Raphaelites. True to the Pre-Raphaelite style, he put forth landscapes of accurate colour and lighting, and vivid detail. He often painted landscapes that typified seasons or a type of weather; city and suburban street scenes and moonlit views of the docks in London, Leeds, Liverpool, and Glasgow also figured largely in his art.

Such works included Whitby, Forge Valley, Scarborough and Going Home by Moonlight along with more rural landscape pieces such as River Landscape.

Grimshaw painted more interior scenes, especially in the 1870s, when he worked until the influence of James Tissot and the Aesthetic Movement. He became particularly successful in this period and was able to afford to rent a second home in Scarborough, which also became a favourite subject. His later work also included imagined scenes from the Greek and Roman empires, and subjects from Longfellow and Tennyson — pictures including Elaine and The Lady of Shalott. (Grimshaw named all of his children after characters in Tennyson's poems). In the 1880s, Grimshaw maintained a London studio in Chelsea, not far from James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Unlike Whistler's Impressionistic night scenes, however, Grimshaw continued to work in a realistic mode where painting within this genre.

Atkinson Grimshaw died on the 13th October 1893, and is buried in Woodhouse cemetery, leaving behind him no letters, journals, or papers; thus scholars and critics have little material on which to base their understanding of his life and career. His reputation rested on his townscapes. On Hampstead Hill epitomizes Grimshaw's appeal to his age, and basis for later critical approbation; a broad range of light tones are employed in capturing the mood of the passing of twilight into the onset of night. By applying his skill in lighting effects, and unusually careful attention to detail, he was often capable of intricately describing a scene, while strongly conveying its mood. His "paintings of dampened gas-lit streets and misty waterfronts conveyed an eerie warmth as well as alienation in the urban scene". With regards to his mature nightscapes, Whistler remarked that "I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw Grimmy's moonlit pictures." Grimshaw's pictures applied the tradition of rural moonlight images to the Victorian city, recording the rain and mist, the puddles and smoky fog of late Victorian industrial England.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a major revival of interest in Grimshaw's work, with several important exhibits of his canon. His main paintings include Nightfall on the Thames (1880) and Shipping on the Clyde (1881). Shipping on the Clyde, a depiction of Glasgow's Victorian docks, is a particularly lyric evocation of the industrial era and Grimshaw's characteristic rendering of near-forensic small details, in this case moisture penetrating clothes in the misty early mornings.

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