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The Cripples |
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The Lake 1937 |
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Coming from the mill |
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Floating Bridge |
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Floating Bridge sketch
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Industrial Scene 1965
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Lancashire Scene 1925 |
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Hidden man red eyes |
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'Waiting for
the shop to open' |
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The pond 1950 |
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Piccadilly Gardens |
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Pendalbury 1936 |
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The waste ground 1949 |
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The Schoolyard |
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L. S. Lowry -
Biography |
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L. S. Lowry - Early life |
Lowry was
born the only child of Robert Stephen, an Irish-born estate agent,
and Elizabeth (née Hobson) a concert pianist and piano teacher in
the middle class suburb of Victoria Park in Rusholme. His family
called him 'Laurie'. It was a difficult birth and his mother, who
had been hoping for a girl, was uncomfortable even looking at him at
first. Later she expressed her envy of her sister Mary, who had
"three splendid daughters" instead of one "clumsy boy".
After Lowry's birth his mother's
health was too poor for her to continue teaching. She is reported to
have been gifted and respected. She was an irritable, nervous woman
who had been brought up to expect high standards by her stern
father. Like him she was controlling and intolerant of failure. She
used illness as a means of securing the attention and obedience of
her mild and affectionate husband and she dominated her son in the
same way. Lowry had an unhappy childhood. At school he made few
friends and showed no academic aptitude. His father was affectionate
towards him but he could not gain the approval that he craved from
his mother. |
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L. S. Lowry - Art
studies |
When he
reached school-leaving age his vocation was not obvious but an aunt
noted that he had been good at drawing ships, so in 1903 his parents
enrolled him in private art lessons with Reginald Barber despite his
father's completely indifference towards the illustrative arts. A
year later, at seventeen, he started work as a clerk with a
Manchester chartered accountant. From 1905 he attended evening
classes at Manchester College of Art studying classes in freehand
drawing, light & shade, preparatory antique and, when his aptitude
became apparent, life studies under Pierre Adolphe Valette. He was
employed as a clerk for the General Accident Fire and Life Assurance
Company in 1907 and he started private art classes with the American
portrait painter William Fitz in the same year.
In 1909 his father's business
failed and the family had to move to a smaller house at 117 Station
Road, Pendlebury, an industrial suburb to the northwest of Salford.
Lowry became a rent collector for the Pall Mall Property Company in
1910. It is at this time that he took up painting seriously and his
sketchbooks were filled with images from the streets and homes that
he visited for his day job. In 1915 he started evening classes at
Salford School of Art under Bernard D Taylor and the stylised human
form that became his trademark began to emerge. Taylor encouraged
him to use the white backgrounds that would come to be one of his
trademarks. In 1928 he stopped attending art school. |
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L. S. Lowry -
Exhibiting |
He first
exhibited in 1919 with two paintings at the Annual Exhibition the
Manchester Academy of Fine Arts and showed widely throughout the
1920s although his work was often dismissed as amateurish and
childlike. In 1921 he exhibited his work in the offices of the
Manchester architect Roland Thomasson and sold his first picture, a
pastel entitled The Lodging House. He entered paintings in
the Paris Salon, with the New English Art Club (from 1927 to 1936),
in Dublin, Manchester and Japan.
Lowry illustrated A Cotswold
Book written by H. W. Timperley in 1930 with twelve drawings
made soon after he held a solo exhibition of drawings at the Round
House gallery at Manchester University. The book was published in
1931.
In 1938, Alexander J. McNeill
Reid, a director of the Lefevre Gallery in London, saw several of
Lowry's paintings awaiting framing at James Bourlet & Sons Limited
(now the transport division of Sotheby's auction house). He inquired
after the artist and in 1939 a one-man exhibition of his paintings
was held at the Lefevre Gallery (some books on Lowry call it the
Reid & Lefevre Gallery). That exhibition sold sixteen paintings
including one to the Tate Gallery (for just £15). It came as a very
pleasant surprise to Lowry, who said that the show gave him more
pleasure than anything else in art. The (Reid &) Lefevre Gallery
showed 15 solo exhibitions of his work between 1945 and 1979.
He first exhibited at the
Manchester Academy of Fine Arts (MAFA) in 1932, was elected a member
in 1934 and continued to exhibit there annually until 1972. In 1936
Salford City Art Gallery bought its first Lowry painting from the
MAFA exhibition; it was A Street Scene painted in 1928. The
city held its first one man show of his work in 1941 and opened a
permanent collection of his work in 1958. He became a member of the
Royal Society of British Artists in 1934. He first exhibited at the
Royal Academy Summer Show in 1932 and was elected an Associate in
1955 and a full Royal Academician in 1962.
Lowry and some other members of
the Manchester Arts Club formed a sub-group called the Manchester
Group, which exhibited at the Midday Studios, Moseley Street,
Manchester and elsewhere in the city until 1956.
Retrospective exhibitions of his
work include those at Salford City Art Gallery as part of the 1951
Festival of Britain, the Manchester City Art Gallery in 1959, the
Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield in 1962, and at the Stone Gallery,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1964. In 1965 the Arts Council curated a
touring retrospective exhibition that ended with a six-week show at
the Tate Gallery in 1967. The Royal Academy, London held a
posthumous tribute in 1976. |
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L. S. Lowry -
Death of his parents |
His father
died in 1932 leaving debts and his mother, who had been subject to
neurosis and depression, became bed ridden. Lowry's mother had
always been a very important figure in his life and now he had to
care for her. He painted from 10 pm to 2 am after his mother had
fallen asleep. He frequently expressed regret that he received
little recognition as an artist until the year that his mother died
and that she had never been able to enjoy his success. From the mid
1930s until at least 1939 Lowry took annual holidays at
Berwick-upon-Tweed. With the outbreak of war Lowry served as a
volunteer fire watcher in Manchester and accepted an invitation to
become a war artist. In 1953 he was appointed Official Artist at the
coronation of Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.
With the death of his mother in
October 1939 Lowry became depressed and neglected the upkeep of his
house to such a degree that the landlord repossessed it in 1948. He
was not short of money and bought The Elms in Mottram-in-Longdendale,
Cheshire. Although he considered the house ugly and uncomfortable he
stayed there until his death almost thirty years later. In his new
home he employed a housekeeper, Mrs Bessie Swindells, who ensured
that he and his home were adequately maintained. She would cook his
breakfast and leave a supper for him. |
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L. S. Lowry -
Retirement |
Lowry
retired from the Pall Mall Property Company in 1952. During his
career he had risen to become chief cashier but he never stopped
collecting rents. The firm had supported his development as an
artist and he was allowed him time off for exhibitions in addition
to his normal holiday allowance. It seems, however, that he was not
proud of his job; his secrecy about his employment by the Pall Mall
Property Company is widely seen as a desire to present himself as a
serious artist but the secrecy extended beyond the art world into
his social circle.
Margery Thompson first met him
when she was a schoolgirl and he became part of her family circle.
He attended concerts with her family and friends, visited her home
and entertained her at his Pendlebury home where he shared his
knowledge of painting. They remained friends until his death but he
never told her that he had any work except his art.
In the 1950s he regularly visited
friends at Cleator Moor, Cumbria (where Geoffrey Bennett was Manager
at National Westminster Bank and Southampton (where Margery Thompson
had moved upon her marriage). Lowry painted pictures of the bank in
Cleator Moor, Southampton Floating Bridge and other scenes local to
his friends' homes.
He befriended the 23-year-old
Cumbrian artist Sheila Fell in November 1955 and supported her
career by buying several pictures that he gave to museums. In 1957
an unrelated thirteen-year-old schoolgirl called Carol Ann Lowry
wrote to Lowry at her mother's urging to ask his advice on becoming
an artist. He visited her home in Heywood, Greater Manchester some
months later and became a family friend. |
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L. S. Lowry -
Awards |
He was
awarded an honorary Master of Arts from the University of Manchester
in 1945, and Doctor of Letters in 1961, and given freedom of the
City of Salford in 1965. In 1975 he was awarded an honorary Doctor
of Letters by the University of Salford and the same degree by the
University of Liverpool. The art world celebrated his 77th birthday
(in 1964) with an exhibition of his work and that of 25 contemporary
artists who had submitted tributes to Monk's Hall Museum, Eccles.
The Hallé Orchestra also performed a concert in his honour and
Harold Wilson used Lowry's painting The Pond as his official
Christmas card. Lowry's painting Coming out of school
was the stamp of
highest denomination
in a series issued
by the Post Office
depicting great
British artists in 1967. |
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L. S. Lowry - Death |
He died of
pneumonia at The Woods hospital in Glossop on 23 February 1976 aged
88. He was buried in Chorlton Southern Cemetery, Manchester next to
his parents. He left his estate to Carol Ann Lowry. |
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L. S. Lowry -
Personal life |
Lowry never
married although he had several young female friends. He claimed
never to have "had a girl [friend]". He said that he lived for his
mother and that all he wanted was her smile or a word of praise from
her. His father was indifferent to his artistic activity and
although Lowry believed that his mother did not understand his
painting, "she understood me and that was enough". Elizabeth Lowry
never did appreciate her son, however.
In later life, starting in the
1950s, Lowry would often spend holidays at the Seaburn Hotel in
Seaburn, Sunderland, Tyne & Wear, painting scenes of the beach, as
well as nearby ports and coal mines. It is believed that the sea air
appealed to him, as well as the industrial scenes that were very
different from the satanic mills of Greater Manchester. Lowry
is fondly remembered in the city as a kindly old man, always wrapped
up even at the height of summer, who kept himself to himself.
When he had no sketchbook with
him, Lowry would often draw scenes in pencil or charcoal on the back
of scrap paper such as envelopes, serviettes, and cloakroom tickets
and present them to young people sitting with their families nearby.
Such serendipitous pieces are now worth thousands of pounds; a
serviette sketch can be seen at the Sunderland Mariott Hotel
(formerly the Seaburn Hotel).
He may have had Asperger's
Syndrome (the high-functioning form of autism) but this remains a
contentious diagnosis that is not shared by those that knew him
personally.
He was a secretive and
mischievous man who enjoyed stories irrespective of their truth. His
friends have observed that his anecdotes were more notable for their
humour than their accuracy and in many cases he set out deliberately
to deceive. His stories of the fictional Ann were inconsistent and
he invented other people as frameworks upon which to hand his tales.
The collection of clocks in his living room were all set at
different times: to some people he said that this was because he
didn't want to know the real time; to others he claimed that it was
to save him from being deafened by their simultaneous chimes.
The contradictions in his life
are exacerbated by this confusion. He is widely seen as a shy man
but he had many long-lasting friendships and made new friends
throughout his adult life. He was contrary and could be selfish but
he was generous and concerned for the well-being of his friends and
of strangers. It may be as Sheila Fell has said: "He was a great
humanist. To be a humanist one has first to love human beings, and
to be a great humanist one has to be slightly detached from them."
In later life he grew tired of
being approached by strangers on account of his celebrity and he
particularly disliked being visited at home in this way. Another of
his unverifiable stories had him keeping a suitcase by the front
door so that he could claim to be just leaving, a practice he
claimed to have abandoned after a helpful young man insisted on
taking him to the station and had to be sent off to buy a paper so
that Lowry could buy a ticket for just one stop without revealing
his deceit. |
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L. S. Lowry
(1887-1976) |
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