Grimshaw painted Victorian cities at night, in rain, by moonlight, and in autumn, which covers most of the conditions available in northern England. The lamp-lit streets of Leeds, Liverpool, Scarborough, and London glow with a wet, precise luminosity that makes you want to put on a coat and walk into the painting.

He was born in Leeds, the son of a retired policeman. His parents disapproved of his artistic ambitions. He married his cousin and settled in Knostrop Old Hall, a manor house outside Leeds that appears in several of his paintings. He was largely self-taught, influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites' attention to natural detail and by Whistler's tonal paintings, particularly the Nocturnes.

His technique is painstaking. The moonlit skies are built up in thin glazes. The reflections on wet pavements are precise. The bare trees, silhouetted against pale skies, are painted branch by branch. The figures are small and anonymous, walking through streets that are atmospheric rather than narrative. He rarely told stories. He painted moods.

Whistler reportedly said 'I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimshaw's moonlit pictures.' Whether Whistler actually said this is uncertain (Whistler said many things), but the comparison is fair. Both painted the same subject, night, with the same seriousness, though Grimshaw's approach was more literal and Whistler's more abstract.

He worked prolifically, partly from financial necessity. He had many children and the manor house was expensive to maintain. He died in 1893, at fifty-seven, and fell out of critical favour for most of the twentieth century. His paintings now sell well at auction and are among the most popular Victorian images in print.