L. S. Lowry (1887-1976) was one of the most popular British artists of the 20th century. Best known for his busy city scenes set in the industrial north of England, Lowry's typical milieu was one of factory gates and smoke stacks, street scenes and ad hoc sports. Ordinary folk going about their business, frozen in time forever by Lowry's observing, kindly eye.
A lifelong bachelor, Laurence Stephen Lowry was a solitary figure. He's gone down in history as something of an English eccentric, in the manner of William Blake or Stanley Spencer. During his lifetime, his work was sometimes unfairly dismissed as being that of phlegmatic dour Northerner. Critics of the day, like the perpetually highly-strung Brian Sewell, shrilly denounced him as being 'inept, tedious, repetitive, lacklustre and stuck in a rut'. But this misses the point by a good country mile or two. Lowry's work evinces and elevates the hidden poetry of the every day. There is a sublime sense of humanity and cautious optimism in his scenes - children playing in bleak streets or people gathering amidst unlovely industrial backdrops. Yet he never sentimentalised or romanticised his subjects, but rendered them with a characteristically muted palette depicted small moments of togetherness, humanity and community, now all evocative of a bygone era.
While Lowry spent most of his life living and working in industrial areas around Manchester, he never actually set foot in a factory or mill, working instead as a rent collector, encountering a colourful cast of characters on his daily rounds. One can imagine the stories and lives he would have entered on his daily rounds. from the desperately poor scrabbling for a shilling or so to those who would gleefully take silent, breath-holding refuge behind the antimacassars, while Lowry knocked lugubriously without.
And with the passing of time, these scenes have taken on added significance. Most of the industrial buildings in Lowry’s pictures have now disappeared – including the construction that first inspired him to paint in such a vein, the Acme Spinning Company Mill in Pendlebury (which was demolished in 1984). But beyond the streets of Northern Britain, he expanded his world view to portraits from the mid-1930s, to the seascapes and rural landscapes that pepper his oeuvre from the late 1940s onwards. Some of the seascapes are so empty as to border on abstraction, consisting simply of an expanse of water, an expanse of sky, and a horizon line in between. These are about as far removed as one can imagine from Lowry’s bustling, city scenes.
Yet it is urban imagery for which he remains famous, scenes that create a source of nostalgia for a hard-working, industrial England that no longer exists.
Seven Small Facts About LS Lowry
1. An only child, Laurence Stephen Lowry spent his first years in the leafy outskirts of Manchester. His family were middle class, but his father – an administrator in an estate agent’s office – was beset by money problems. The Lowrys would be forced to move to the harsher area of Pendlebury, where views were dominated by imposing factories and cotton mills.
Despite childhood dreams of becoming an artist, economic reality meant Lowry had to get a job at 16. According to an anecdote in his biography, A Private View of LS Lowry by Shelley Rohde, visitors to the family home had to ‘spread butter on [their] bread, then scrape it off again, so there was just the merest taste on each slice’.
2. Lowry never became a full-time artist. He worked as a rent collector until his retirement, aged 64, devoting himself to art only in his spare hours. Between 1905 and 1925, he took evening classes – in painting and drawing – at the Manchester Municipal College of Art and then the Salford School of Art.
“In my own opinion I owe everything to the drawing I used to do at the art school, first the antique drawing and then the life” (Lowry quoted in Allen Andrews, The Life of L.S. Lowry, Jupiter Publishing, London, 1977, p. 61).
3. Lowry trained under the French Impressionist Adolphe Valette at the Manchester College of Art.
"I cannot over-estimate the effect on me at that time of the coming into this drab city of Adolphe Valette, full of the French Impressionists, aware of everything that was going on in Paris." Lowry to Sir John Rothenstein
4. He is renowned, above all, for his scenes of England’s industrial north, complete with factories, smoking chimneys, red terraced houses, and workers en masse. "My ambition," he said, "was to put the industrial scene on the map because nobody [before] had done it seriously".
5. Lowry was a lover of football and watched his favourite team, Manchester City, in numerous matches over the years. He featured football in his pictures too – though his focus tended to be on fans at, or on their way to, a stadium rather than the game itself. A fine example is his painting from 1953, Going to the Match, which the Professional Football Association bought for £1.9 million at Sotheby’s in 1999: at the time, the record price paid for a work by Lowry at auction.
"My ambition was to put the industrial scene on the map because nobody before had done it seriously".
Crowds were an endless source of fascination for Lowry, usually brought together by social events, sporting occasions, or simply going about the daily routine. His 1938 painting, A Cricket Match transports the viewer to the very roots of cricket, far from the glamour of the big leagues, and instead shows a scene emblematic of British community life: a backstreet cricket match played by local children on a patch of waste ground behind their terraced houses.
Recapture the Joy of Childhood in Lowry’s Cricket Match
"Once you have seen how Lowry saw us, you cannot ever see or be in a football crowd, nor watch kids playing, workers leaving the factory, queuing, or stopping to chat or hear the fairground barker, without saying, 'Lowry! It’s just like a Lowry painting!' Going about our business or pleasure, we are all subjects of his vision"
6. Lowry had his first solo show in 1939, at London’s Alex Reid & Lefevre gallery, currently one of the most prestigious spaces in Mayfair. It was from this exhibition that Tate Gallery bought the first of the 23 paintings by Lowry it currently owns: Dwelling, Ordsall Lane, Salford. Many honours came the painter’s way after that, including being named a member of the Royal Academy in 1962. Lowry would turn a knighthood down later that decade, explaining to the UK’s then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, that "all my life I’ve felt most strongly against social distinction of any kind".
In 2000, a purpose-built arts complex was opened in the artist’s name (three miles from Pendlebury) in Salford Quays: The Lowry contains the world’s largest collection of his paintings.
7. The Second World War marked a turning point for the artist. During the Blitz, he volunteered as a firewatcher on the roof of Manchester department stores. Once the War was over, he increasingly turned his back on the city and took to depicting seaside resorts in the north of England, where day-trippers and holiday-makers can be seen enjoying a jolly time.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Lowry went on to paint seascapes and rural landscapes without human presence. Some of the former are so empty as to border on abstraction, consisting simply of an expanse of water, an expanse of sky, and a horizon line in between. These works are about as far removed as one can imagine from Lowry’s bustling, urban scenes of old.
