Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A.

Lefevre Gallery, London

T. & R. Annan and Sons, Glasgow, 1946

Acquired by Sir Antony and Lady Hornby around the late 1960s, and thence by descent to the present owners

Glasgow, T. & R. Annan and Sons , Paintings by L. S. Lowry, February - March 1946, no. 12

‘I see lots of people everywhere, myself, one lot going one way and the other lot going the opposite way, as a rule.’ (LS Lowry, quoted in Andras Kalman and Andrew Lambirth, LS Lowry, Conversation Pieces, Chaucer Press, London, 2003, p. 28)

People were fascinating to LS Lowry, who regularly, in his characteristic style, depicted their everyday movements with a sense of lyricism and hope. Despite occupying a tiny proportion of the canvas, to Lowry, it is the people who give the painting meaning. He quoted as saying: ‘a street is not a street without people... it is as dead as mutton'. (Lowry, taped interview with Gerald Cotton and Frank Mullineux, see Judith Sandling and Michael Leber, L.S. Lowry, The Man and his Art, Salford, 1993, p. 17).

There is a real sense of the presence of the observer in this work. By depicting tracks in the ground which diverge and continue off the canvas, we are reminded of our own role as the viewer, invited to watch the scene unfold before us. Indeed, Lowry’s own existence was that of a silent spectator. The artist never married nor had children, and many commentators over the years have suggested that a solitary existence affected the pictures he painted. Lowry himself said that ‘had I not been lonely, none of my work would have happened. I should not have … seen the way I saw things.’

In reducing the figures to simple forms in Lowry’s characteristic style, the artist also removes their individuality and anonymises these figures, providing a blank canvas upon which the observer is invited to place their own understanding of human emotion and connection. Almost eighty years on, the fact that audiences can still empathise and relate to the universal nature of these relationships and the beauty in these simple moments, demonstrates why LS Lowry is one of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth century.

‘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’

SIR IAN MCKELLAN (‘MY LIFELONG PASSION FOR L.S. LOWRY’, THE TELEGRAPH, APRIL 2011)

The present work is from the collection of Sir Antony (1904 – 1987) and Lady Hornby (1910-1971), who, during the mid 20th century, put together one of the foremost collections of Modern Art in Britain including works by European artists such as Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse and Balthus alongside pictures by their British contemporaries including Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Christopher Wood, Stanley Spencer and L.S. Lowry. Sir Antony had been a senior partner at Cazenove and was President of Savoy Hotels Ltd. He developed a particular passion for the art of the avant-garde and his grandchildren fondly remember his apartment at Claridges where he lived for the last two decades of his life surrounded by masterworks of modern art. He had presented Renoir’s A Bather to the National Gallery, London, in 1961 and amongst other bequests, he left Braque’s Glass on a Table (1909-10) to the Tate Collection.