Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A.

Lefevre Gallery, London
Halcyon Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owner

Geoffrey Mather, L.S. Lowry Obituary, Daily Express, 24th February 1976, illustrated.

The canvas appears to be in good overall condition. The paint surface is in good overall condition. Held in a gilded composition frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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There can be few British artists of the twentieth century who paint an everyday scene with such quiet accomplishment as Lowry. His exceptional gift for observation and his affinity with the quirks of individuals are blended seamlessly with a subtle gift for composition that draws the viewer into an image as surely as if we had stepped into the painting itself.

Although Lowry frequently painted identifiable locations, one often gets the distinct impression that this was rarely important to him. Thus, a setting such as Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester was more important as the place where he gathered the subjects he favoured, rather than as the place itself. Lowry was more than happy to alter topography, buildings and proportions to suit his own ends and therefore the component of his figure compositions that is of prime importance is the crowd that populates it; he was fascinated by the duality of each crowd, the individuals as well as the unified group.

Thus, in the present painting, we find ourselves immersed into Lowry's world. The meeting point of two streets with their terraces of small houses, front doors opening directly onto the pavement, and the suggestion of industry beyond, functions not unlike a stage set, placing us firmly in the kind of neighbourhood that would have been recognisable across virtually every industrial town and city across the Midlands and North of England until very recently. The universality of the ordinary and mundane, whether you had grown up in such an area or not, has perhaps always contributed to the general popularity of Lowry's work, but without his ability to bring life to these streets, his work would have been merely like the nostalgic reproductions that many of his imitators could not escape.

Instead of trying to create a fanciful, gaslight-tinted view of a past, Lowry recognised that the basic elements of people and their relationships are timeless. Through his lifetime of observation, he built up a stock of movements, gestures, postures and attitudes that are unmistakeably like those we can see down any street in any place, should we choose to look. The many figures who gather, walk, play and chat in this street carry a stamp of authenticity, regardless of how many times we have seen them in other paintings. Lowry often employed circular or elliptical compositional tracks within his paintings to imperceptibly draw the eye of the viewer around his paintings, and here we see that the apparently random groupings are anything but. The two red front doors mark the boundaries of a central area of the painting in which Lowry leads us through the figures in a flattened figure of eight form, always drawing us back to the two chatting men just slightly to the right of the central axis of the painting. Of these, the left hand figure looks directly at us, perhaps warily, perhaps quizzically, but with complete engagement. However, our path to this direct confrontation leads us past many other notable figures, the striding man, who, hands in pockets, walks off to the left of the painting, the figure who pops out of the doorway behind him, the man in the foreground carrying a parcel neatly tied with string, all figures who we have met before in other paintings but who still exist here with equal veracity. Later in his life Lowry became fascinated by the play Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello and the concept of these characters existing independently of their creator had a clear resonance for Lowry as he had done almost the same himself, creating a cast of entirely believable figures who appear again and again in his work. It is perhaps this drawing together of them and us which gives much of Lowry's best work an incredible duality of strangeness and familiarity, something that stands outside the period that created them and underlies the continued appeal of his painting.