Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. (1887-1976)

Monty Bloom's passion for the work of L.S. Lowry began by chance when he caught the end of John Read's 1958 documentary for the BBC, Artist into film. A successful businessman from Southport, Lowry's industrials evoked Bloom's childhood home in the Rhondda Valley in Wales. He developed a life-long friendship with the artist and, at one time, owned over one hundred works by the artist.

Mervyn Levy remarked on the medium in the present work, an early pastel: 'the use of pastel was a vital step in the direction of oil painting as his ultimate medium of expression. More controllable than watercolour, it provided, as here, a bridge between drawing and painting that indicated that the artist needed a colour medium that could be worked into and developed over a period' (see L.S. Lowry, Royal Academy exhibition catalogue, London, 1976, p. 46).