• Overview

    Laurence Stephen Lowry remains one of the most distinctive English painters of the twentieth century, known for a style that recorded the people and architecture of the industrial north with an unmistakable, instantly recognisable eye.

    Born in Manchester in 1887, Lowry showed an interest in drawing from around the age of eight and began private painting lessons in his teens. In 1904, aged sixteen, he left school and took a position as a clerk, later working for many years as a rent collector for the Pall Mall Property Company. He remained in full time employment until his retirement in his sixties, keeping his working life and his art almost entirely separate; it was not widely known until after his death how long he had worked in an office alongside painting. His formal training began at the Municipal College of Art in Manchester, and he later studied at Salford School of Art. At Manchester he was taught by the French artist Adolphe Valette, who introduced him to Impressionist technique and to the study of drawing from the old masters. Lowry moved away from Valette's Impressionism, developing instead a plainer, more direct approach suited to the subjects he was drawn to. In his early twenties Lowry began exploring the industrial districts of south Lancashire, finding subject matter in the mills, collieries and terraced streets around Pendlebury and Salford. He became known for street scenes populated by workers, housewives and children set against factories, chimneys and rows of housing, a combination that became central to his mature style. He spent much of his free time walking the streets of Manchester and Salford, making pencil sketches on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes, material he later drew on for finished work. In his earlier factory scenes the buildings themselves dominate, and the mood is often dark; as his work developed, figures took on a more prominent role, until figures and setting were combined into a single, unified composition. From the mid-1950s, as the industrial north began to change through redevelopment and demolition, Lowry turned increasingly to compositions of figures set against plain white backgrounds, sometimes with only a suggestion of pavement or wall, giving these later works a quality of figures suspended outside a fixed place or time. Lowry's paintings and drawings are now held in major private and public collections in the United Kingdom and abroad, including the Tate, and his work continues to be exhibited and sought after internationally.

  • a drawing of 1933

    Lowry and the
    Industrial North

    No British artist of the twentieth century is more closely identified with the life of the industrial North than Laurence Stephen Lowry. Born in Stretford in 1887, he spent his whole career in and around Manchester and Salford, employed for more than forty years as a rent collector for the Pall Mall Property Company while painting and drawing in the evenings. He trained at the Manchester Municipal School of Art, where he was taught by the French painter Adolphe Valette, and later at the Salford School of Art, in the middle of the mills and terraced streets that became his lifelong subject. From these surroundings, and from 1909 from the family home at Pendlebury, he built one of the most recognisable bodies of work in British art: white grounds, smoking chimneys, and streets filled with figures going about the ordinary business of the day.

    His daily rounds gave him his material. Walking the streets between houses, he watched crowds gather at accidents, at school gates, at church doors and at football grounds, and it was the crowd, and the solitary figure within it, that occupied him for the rest of his life. The pencil drawings of the late 1920s and 1930s, in which these subjects were first worked out at full length, stand at the centre of this achievement, and it is to this group that the present drawing belongs.

    Recognition came late. His first London exhibition, at the Lefevre Gallery in 1939, established his reputation; he was elected a Royal Academician in 1962; and the retrospective mounted by the Royal Academy in 1976, in the months after his death, drew record attendances. His work is held in public collections across Britain, The Lowry at Salford Quays houses the largest public holding of his art, and his major paintings now command seven figure sums at auction.

  • Crowded
    Street Scene

    Some twenty figures have gathered in a street before a run of iron railings: men in flat caps, bowlers and overcoats, one drawing on a pipe, women in long coats and skirts, and children among them, a small girl in a pale coat and bonnet at the centre of the group, a boy running across the foreground, another figure passing through the middle distance. Behind the railings stand tall, many windowed buildings, a small cross rising from the roofline, with gabled houses closing the view beyond; at the lower right a picket fence and a wooden chair stand before a dark house front. The drawing is worked in graded pencil throughout, the buildings shaded in close hatching, the figures set down in dense dark strokes against the lighter ground of the street. It is signed and dated at the lower left.

    The drawing was made in 1933, when Lowry was living at Pendlebury and working by day on his collecting rounds. The fully worked pencil compositions of these years were not preparatory studies but complete works in their own right, carried through from edge to edge of the paper, and the subject here, a crowd drawn together in the open street, watched from a slight distance, is the central subject of his oeuvre. The occasion of the gathering is not shown; as in many of Lowry's street subjects, the crowd itself is the subject.

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