Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. (1887-1976)
Lot 58

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

An Ancient Road

Closed11 November 2010

Price Realised

GBP 40,850

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Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. (1887-1976)
An Ancient Road
signed and dated 'L.S. LOWRY 1930' (lower right)
pencil
7 x 10¼ in. (17.8 x 26 cm.)

with Harper Fine Paintings, Stockport, 1995.

Specialist note

Like lot 44, A Curved House, Maugersbury, An Ancient Road was drawn in 1930, the year in which he fulfilled his one and only book illustration commission, A Cotswold Book, with his friend Timperley.

Unlike the almost rigid structure of the very formal architectural drawing for Maugersbury, An Ancient Road is in a very free form, rather as if it is merely a notation of a particular rural scene, which he wants to commit to easy memory for a later landscape view.

With its solitary tree on the distant horizon and the post-harvest remnants of little mounds of grass or hay on the two foreground slopes it could be merely an accurate rendering of an autumnal landscape or, with its title and the use of the work Harvest it could be a reference to the timelessness of the theme and a recognition that this 1930 landscape would also be a representation of how that same land lay in Roman times.

T.G.R.