Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A.

Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd, London
Mrs. G. Lewitt
Sale, Christie's London, 3rd March 1989, lot 436, where acquired by the late owner

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, L.S. Lowry, 30th April - 1st June 1973, cat. no.33, illustrated;
Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Body and Soul: Peter Moores Liverpool Project 3, 23rd October 1975 - 4th January 1976, cat. no.74;
Salford, The Lowry, A Lowry Summer, 7^th July – 9^th September 2012, un-numbered exhibition;
London, Tate, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, 25th June - 20th October 2013, un-numbered exhibition, illustrated fig.22.

Shelley Rohde, L.S. Lowry, A Biography, Lowry Press, Salford, 1979, reprinted 1999, p.334.

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar or Hamish Dewar Ltd., 13 & 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James's, London, SW1Y 6BU. Structural Condition: The canvas is unlined on the original keyed wooden stretcher and this is ensuring a sound and secure structural support. Paint Surface: The paint surface has an even but discoloured varnish layer and should respond very well to cleaning if this is required. Inspection under ultra-violet light confirms how discoloured the varnish layers have become and shows just a very thin horizontal line of inpainting covering craquelure running to the left of the tall chimney approximately 4.5 cm below the upper horizontal framing edge. This is no more than a hairline of infilling of craquelure. There may also be a few tiny spots of inpainting on the upper left vertical framing edge. There are some very small losses on the outer turnover edge which will be covered by a framing sight edge. Summary: The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition and should respond well to cleaning should this be required. Housed behind glass in a thick painted wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 66424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

If Lowry's painting as a whole can be seen as an elegy, a decades-long lament for a world that was already on the wane by the 1930s, then After The Fire is perhaps the most elegiac of all his works, a song within a song that encompasses all that Lowry sought to record and distill, in painting after painting, from the unforgiving lives of the working man in the industrial cities of the North of England. Elegy is different from nostalgia – there is a lack of sentimentality and an inherent sadness to it – and it is Lowry’s deliberate choice of the one over the other that gives his painting its emotional depth, as well as its art historical significance.

After The Fire may well be based on a real event that Lowry saw on his endless rounds across Manchester, but it is so much more than a straight re-telling. The restrained, reduced palette that Lowry uses suffuses it with a melancholy that is subtle, even beautiful.  The sky has turned the colour of ash and a clear, white light pervades everywhere. The mood is cold and bleak. The mill, that unerring, demanding presence in so many of Lowry's paintings (fig.1, Coming From the Mill, 1930, The Lowry, Salford), still sits at the composition’s heart, but here it is a hollow shell. With a visual play that demonstrates just how sophisticated an artist Lowry was, smoke seems to rise from the ashes of this hulk, playing on Romantic notions of the Sublime.  But this seemingly poetic effect is based on un-Romantic fact: the smoke is actually coming from the smaller factories that surround the burnt-out mill and that continue to work, to their advantage. As the two clocks in the distance are there to show, there is no time for standing idly by, to wonder; the city grinds on regardless. Yet the mill’s workers do just this. They are still drawn, on this grey, misty morning, to the building that is both their means of survival and the source of all their troubles. However, all the hurrying movement of the crowd across the picture that one usually sees in Lowry's paintings of factories has been stilled. Instead the men and women gather in groups, not quite sure which way to turn. Only the boys playing tag in the walled-off ‘croft’ to the left are on the move with any purpose.

As the art historian T.J. Clark writes in his introduction to the catalogue for the recent Lowry retrospective at the Tate, part of what makes Lowry a great artist is his 'aesthetic honesty', in which 'stereotype cedes to limited fact' (T.J. Clark & Anne M. Wagner, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, Tate Publishing, London, 2013, p.61).  In After The Fire these ‘limited facts’ are that, with the mill burnt down, those figures gathering in the foreground have nowhere to go.  In a few lyrical dashes of the brush, delineating caps, threadbare overcoats, bodies pressed against the chill, he adds further ‘facts’: that with no work money will be tight, rent will go unpaid, children will go unfed. Hearths will not be lit (and this is a painting suffused with cold). All of this narrative is contained, without drama, within Lowry’s clear, unsentimental telling of the story, which, as always, is a play between people and their surrounding brick-built environment. Similar to other of Lowry’s masterpieces, the narrative unveils itself slowly as the eye moves between the groups of figures stationed in the fore- and middle-grounds, on to the unending, uncaring city glimpsed in the distance and then back to the little pub on the right, now home from home for the dispossessed workers - where the landlord, no doubt, is this very moment weighing up how much he can give ‘on tick’ without risking his own livelihood.  As our eye moves around the painting in this way, so these seemingly generic figures each reveals itself to have been painted as an individual, weighing up the implications of this fire for them, the ‘limited facts’ of debt, hunger and cold.

When pressed in interviews, Lowry had no issue with commentators remarking that his works were 'stuck' in the Manchester of the 1920s. This, after all, was the world he knew and with which he identified at a deep intellectual and emotional level: these were the years that Lowry’s life as a rent collector took him all over the city’s streets, as an active, integral participant in the life of the working classes rather than a ‘detached’ observer.  After The Fire is a perfect distillation of how fragile, how brittle this life was, and how the city holds its inhabitants in an equally warm and desolating embrace. With the factory reduced to rubble, what now pins the workers to its hard, white streets?