Laurence Stephen Lowry

Crane Kalman Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owners, 1963

London, Crane Kalman Gallery, Conversation Pieces, October 2003.

Original canvas. There is an old pinhole in the upper left corner and some very minor feint stretcher bar marks by the right edge otherwise in excellent original condition with strong passages of impasto throughout. Under ultraviolet light, there appear to be no signs of retouching. Held in a plaster gilt frame with canvas inset. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Old and dilapidated buildings always held a fascination for Lowry. In fact, one of the few examples he gave of his father taking an interest in his work was over such a forlorn building, when he drew his son's attention to St Simon's Church, Salford, with the words 'you'll really have to go and see the St Simon's Church, it's your cup of tea and it's going to come down very soon'. Throughout his work we see buildings that are broken and bowed, whose once grand, or at least respectable origins have been washed away as the Industrial Revolution expanded the industrial towns to engulf the small villages and districts that surrounded them. This drift downwards was perhaps something with which Lowry himself identified. In his childhood and youth the family had moved from district to district, each time the new home being just slightly lower on the almost imperceptible scale with which the British judge their neighbourhoods. Moving to Pendlebury in 1909, the family was now in the heart of a district that had become hugely industrialized, and although 117 Station Road was a decent enough house, the surrounding area was far from salubrious.

In Old Houses, Lowry shows us a snapshot of the kind of life which was only too familiar in countless industrial districts of cities across the midlands and the north of England. The backs of the houses reveal their true state, worn and altered, with extra doors and steps added to facilitate their change to multi-room lodging houses, the blue-painted hoardings suggesting that perhaps demolition may not be that far away. Indeed, on the hoardings to the right we can see what appears to be a notice of some sort, perhaps an official notice of demolition. As is not unusual for Lowry, the genesis of this painting lies in an earlier drawing, Old Houses in Pendlebury (formerly collection of Carel Weight) of 1939, but in the final painting Lowry has expanded the width of the street to allow for a vista of the town beyond, and exaggerated the height of the central house to perhaps emphasise its sad neglect.

The area around the houses is busy with life, if not activity. The sense that many of these figures are just waiting, killing time, is inescapable, and is redolent of the documentary photographs of the depression era, such as the Mass Observation movement, where groups of unemployed men simply hang around in hope that the following day might bring some form of a wage. As one often finds with Lowry's crowds, one figure in particular will gradually attract the attention of the viewer, and here, amongst the general comings and goings, one small group catches one's notice. In the centre of the space between the blue hoardings, a man, a woman and two children surround a central figure. It is immediately noticeable that he is a little taller than them, a little straighter in stance, and his clothes appear that little bit smarter and more fitted than those around him. A tiny flash of red even suggests a slightly dandyish coloured tie. Lowry was well aware that his occupation as a rent-collector allowed him to pass into the poorer districts almost unnoticed, areas in which his presence without such a pretext would have been less than welcome, and it is therefore not unfeasible to wonder if this figure in Old Houses has a similar reason for his presence. This may of course be pure conjecture, and this figure nothing more than a man who has fallen out on his luck and whose dress harks back to a more prosperous part of his life. Perhaps this is where Lowry's talent lies, in his ability to offer us a scene that at first sight appears to lay all before us, but in fact is open to as many different interpretations as we choose.