[57511] Manchester Art Gallery : Street Scene with Figures

Manchester Art Gallery.

Street Scene with Figures.

By Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976).

Oil on canvas, 1949.

 

A man dressed in black clothes, with a red comforter and bowler hat, is striding towards the left. His black figure dominates the whiteish picture. His face, with its features indicated economically in strokes of black paint, is turned towards us. He is crossing a road, as are other figures in the middle distance to the left. A dilapidated fence is behind him. In the far distance are more people, and an industrial townscape, including a church, mill and factory buildings, and chimneys belching smoke. One of the buildings to the left has a structure above it with railings and a wheel, as above a pithead. The whole is painted in Lowry's simplified style and limited colour palette.

 

 

On 4 May 1909, LS Lowry and his parents, Robert and Elizabeth, moved from Manchester’s affluent Victoria Park to 117 Station Road, Pendlebury, a four-bedroomed Victorian semi-detached villa in the countryside beyond the city. He was 21 years old at the time.

 

After enjoying a comfortable childhood, Lowry had started work in 1903 at the age of 16; his father’s financial affairs had become increasingly difficult, meaning Lowry was expected to contribute to the household. He studied part time at Art College in the evenings, but his dream of becoming a professional artist seemed to have all but disappeared.

 

The family initially hated their new surroundings and loss of social standing, so much so that Elizabeth Lowry began to withdraw from society until she became a bed-ridden invalid who required nursing night and day from her long-suffering only child.

 

Despite these inauspicious circumstances, Lowry would later acknowledge the move to Pendlebury as the source of his artistic inspiration: ‘I had lived in the residential side of Manchester — a very nice residential side — and then I went to live in Pendlebury, one of the most industrial villages in the countryside mid-way between Manchester and Bolton ... Vaguely in my mind I suppose pictures were forming, and then for about thirty-odd years after that I did nothing but industrial pictures.’

 

Indeed, the subject matter for his art was identified in a kind of epiphany while looking at the Acme Spinning Mill, lit up against the skyline. Lowry resolved that ‘my ambition was to put the industrial scene on the map because nobody had done it, nobody had done it seriously’. It would nevertheless take another 30 years for the artist to be given his first one-man show in London.

 

Throughout the 1930s, Lowry honed his unique vision of the industrial landscape of Manchester and Salford, taking every opportunity to record his surroundings and the people who he saw in his everyday life, sketching constantly by day, and painting all through the night.

 

He successfully submitted pictures to a number of exhibitions throughout this decade — at the New English Art Club and Royal Academy in London, and at Salford and Manchester Academies, until an important breakthrough came when his work was discovered at his London framers by a director of Lefevre Gallery, AJ McNeill Reid. This led to his first London one-man show there in the autumn of 1939, and he exhibited regularly with the gallery until his death in February 1976.

 

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