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

In 1946, Lowry completed an almost identical painting of this composition. The oil was sold at Bonhams, London, 11 November 1998, lot 74.



'Few British painters have provided in their drawings so complete and revealing a conspectus of their aesthetic, intellectual, and intuitive objects, as L.S. Lowry. His drawings for the most part are intended to be complete in themselves … Lowry learned how to extract from the medium of pencil a rich, wide range of qualities. Even an approximation of ‘colour’ … In his industrial drawings, the artist gradually refined a composite townscape which was to be no place in particular, and yet all places of its kind. At the same time he was evolving a race of people; no particular people, and yet all people, of their kind’ (see M. Levy, Drawings of L.S. Lowry, London, 1963, pp. 7, 14).