Anyone who has read Gilbert White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, one of the most enduringly popular books in the English nature-writing tradition, has encountered the work of Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, who spent a month with White in 1776 producing the illustrations for what would become, after its posthumous publication in 1789, a classic of English literature. Born near Bern in Switzerland in 1733, the son of a notary, Grimm was orphaned at sixteen and initially set to assist a physician before his artistic talent, encouraged by the scientist and poet Albrecht von Haller, won out; he published two volumes of his own poetry before turning decisively to painting, studying under Johann Ludwig Aberli in Bern and producing, as early as 1758, views of the glaciers of the Bernese Oberland among his first professional work.
Grimm moved to Paris in 1765 to study under Johann Georg Wille, refining his skills as a watercolourist and recorder of historic buildings during sketching trips through Normandy and Picardy, before settling permanently in London from 1768. There he became, in the judgement of modern scholars, probably the most prolific and significant of all eighteenth-century topographical artists working in Britain, recording landscapes, antiquities and historic buildings across the length and breadth of the country for patrons who wanted "everything curious" set down before it could be lost or altered. His most important patron by far was the Reverend Sir Richard Kaye, whose rising ecclesiastical career, eventually as Dean of Lincoln, took Grimm travelling with him for the better part of two decades and generated a Kaye collection now in the British Library comprising some 2,500 to 2,600 works; a further 886 watercolours devoted entirely to Sussex, commissioned by Sir William Burrell, were bequeathed to the British Museum. Grimm exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from its first exhibition in 1769, and died in London in 1794, having produced, by conservative estimate, well over three thousand drawings and watercolours during his English career.
The work by Grimm held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings connects a Swiss-born artist's earliest recorded professional subject, the Alpine glaciers of his native Bernese Oberland, to the gallery's own specialism in Alpine landscape, even as the greater part of his career came to be devoted almost entirely to the antiquities and topography of his adopted England.