John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893) was an English Victorian painter who left a clerk's position at a railway company at twenty-four to pursue painting and went on to create some of the most atmospheric nocturnal townscapes in the history of British art. Working from the industrial cities of northern England — Leeds, Liverpool, Hull, Glasgow — he developed a technique of extraordinary exactness, capturing the effect of gaslight on rain-wet cobblestones, moonlight filtering through harbor mist, and the eerie amber glow of Victorian streets with a photo-sharp clarity that baffled critics and enchanted collectors. James McNeill Whistler, who shared a London studio building with him, acknowledged: "I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy's moonlit pictures." His paintings fell from fashion after his death but were rediscovered in the second half of the twentieth century, and they have since attracted devoted collectors worldwide who respond to their combination of precise observation and almost supernatural poetry.