If, like me, you have had access to the same art museum for several years, you have likely developed favorites — works you look forward to seeing again and again as you return to the museum.

For me one of these has been a painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art titled Liverpool from Wapping (images above, top, with detail, second down) by Victorian painter John Atkinson Grimshaw.

The wonderfully atmospheric portrayal of misty twilight along the docks and the warm glow of gaslit windows reflected in wet sidewalks and the grimy slick of the streets captures my attention whenever I walk into the gallery where is hangs. (For some reason, this painting seems to be missing from the museum’s online collection database, though it has been in the museum for as long as I can remember. There are versions here and here, but the color is off in these and most reproductions I’ve seen of this painting. The photos at top are my own, and there is a bit of reflected light in the first one.)

Early on my fascination with this painting encouraged me to look up Grimshaw and find, to my delight, that it was not an anomaly but representative of much of his work. Though he also painted figures, room interiors, other landscape subjects and even fairy pictures, his most frequent themes were docks, towns, streets and rural lanes in misty, rainy, nighttime and low-light conditions.

In these compositions, he utilized a controlled, muted palette and low range of values over most of the image, with a highlighted area of brighter intensity, often the moon or a fog-bound sun, along with the reflected light it projected on wet surfaces. He frequently included a lone, often sihlouetted figure.

Grimshaw’s earliest works showed the distinct influence of landscapes by Pre-Raphaelite painters like William Holman Hunt, Ford Maddox Brown and Sir John Everett Millais, but even early on, he evidenced a fascination with moonlight, mist and fog.

At the end of his career, Grimshaw was experimenting with seascapes in a manner influenced by the French Impressionists, but his own style and subject matter made up the mainstay of his work.

He did not exhibit often, preferring to paint for private patrons, but his work was in demand, and was forged as well as imitated by other artists during his lifetime. He would eventually use just “Atkinson Grimshaw” as his working name, and you will find him commonly referenced that way.

There is an exhibition of Grimshaw’s work, Atkinson Grimshaw, Painter of Moonlight, which is the first major retrospective in 60 years, at the Guild Hall Art Gallery in London, UK, that runs until 15 January, 2012.

Unfortunately it doesn’t appear a catalog has been published to accompany the exhibit, and the only major print collection I’m aware of, Atkinson Grimshaw by Alexander Robertson, is out of print though it may be found used. [Addendum: Readers have been kind enough to inform us that there is a catalog, please see this post’s comments.}

Grimshaw’s studio in the Chelsea section of London was near that of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who reportedly said of Grimshaw, “I considered myself the inventor of Nocturnes until I saw [his] moonlit pictures”.

While most of the best European art has remained in Europe, which is as it should be, a good deal has made its way into museums and collections in the U.S. and elsewhere, much to the delight of those who have access to it.

An exhibition currently at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Rembrandt in America, looks at the the history of collecting Rembrandt paintings in the U.S.

In what looks to be a remarkable show, 27 Rembrandt paintings have been assembled from numerous collections, along with another 23 works by his workshop, assistants and contemporaries that were at one time attributed to the master.

Those who live in New York City with easy access to the Rembrandts in the Metropolitan Museum of art and the Frick collection may be jaded, but in the rest of the country the ability to see Rembrant’s work is much more rare, and a large grouping of his work such as this is unusual by any standard. The show includes works from private collections that are rarely seen by the public (images above, bottom two).

Rembrandt in America is at the North Carolina Museum of Art from now until January 22, 2012. It then moves to the Cleveland Museum of Art where it will be on view from February 19 to May 28, 2012 (and will be accompanied by an exhibition of Rembrandt Prints from the Morgan Library and Museum), and ends its run at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts from June 24 to September 16, 2012.

For those who can’t get to one of the venues in person, there is a rather disjointed image feature on the NCMA website. Clicking on any of the images opens them in a popup within which you can move back and forth, but the series is not always complete. I suggest starting with the eyes of the portrait at the upper right. Be sure to click on the easy to miss “MORE” link below the images for an additional series that contains some of the more interesting images in the exhibition.

As with most museum exhibition previews, I recommend supplementing your viewing with the use of other resources.

You can start by taking note of the sources for works on loan, and looking up the museums and collections to see if a better image is available there. For example, the Indianapolis Museum of Art has a better image of the wonderful self-portrait of Rembrandt as a young man that is part of the show. However, you can sometimes find even better images from other sources, such as an image of that same portrait as seen on the wonderful resource, Rembrandt Life and Work, which, though lighter, reveals more detail (image above, top). Another great resource for Rembrandt images is the Web Gallery of Art. You will find differences in color correction in the same image from different sources as well (including reproductions in books).

Rembrandt’s work, to my mind, is best appreciated up close, and small images often fail to demonstrate his enormous visual power and remarkable brushwork and use of texture. One of the best sources for detailed images of Rembrandt paintings is the beautiful new website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see my recent post), on which several images on loan for the exhibition can be viewed in detail, such as Portrait of a Man, probably a Member of the Van Beresteyn Family (above, second down, with detail, third down, high res version here).

You can easily search the collections for Rembrandt paintings or for an individual title. From the image detail page, choose “Fullscreen”under the image.

There is also a catalog accompanying the exhibition (Amazon link here).

It’s easy to be misled by small images into thinking that Rembrandt’s work consists largely of a bunch of dark, earth colored portraits of stuffy burghers and Biblical scenes, but if you have the chance to see his work in person, to look into the depths of his multi layered glazes and astonishingly textural surfaces, you may discover why he is often at the top of the list of the best painters in the history of Western Art.