"Here is the pencil sketch I promised you. I do hope you will like it." - L. S. Lowry to Miss Holmes, 6 January 1950; the letter accompanying this drawing. The work presented here is a fully worked pencil composition of 1933, signed and dated in the year of its making, from the period in which Lowry's mature manner took its settled form: a street filled with people. Seventeen years later Lowry gave it away, posting it to the family of a friend with a letter that survives, and it is this letter, as much as the drawing itself, that sets the work apart. The letter was written from The Elms, Lowry's house at Mottram-in-Longdendale, and addressed to Miss Holmes, whose father, John M. Holmes, was Principal of the Manchester Municipal School of Art, the school at which Lowry himself had trained, recording the gift after a family outing to a pantomime.

Two facts about the drawing's history carry the artist's own estimate of it. The first is that Lowry kept it: through his first London exhibition in 1939, his election to the Royal Society of British Artists and the move to Mottram in 1948, the drawing remained in his possession for seventeen years, at a time when his work was finding buyers and he had every opportunity to sell it. The second is the manner of its leaving: when he did part with it, it was not through a dealer but as a personal gift, sent with a handwritten letter to the family of the Principal of the school in which he had trained, in thanks for a day spent in their company. What is offered here, then, is an exceptional example of Lowry's pencil work at the height of his early maturity, and a story few works by the artist can match: a drawing he kept, a family he liked, a pantomime, and a letter that has never left its side.