[59224] Salford Quays : The Lowry - The Cripples

The Lowry, Salford Quays, Greater Manchester.

 

Photography of the Lowry paintings is prohibited in the gallery. I was told that some of them are not owned by the gallery and, therefore, it was necessary to impose a blanket ban. I was subsequently informed that certain pictures could be photographed on request. I requested to photograph one particular picture but was refused permission owing to its private ownership. So I gave up. The four I did take were prior to my knowledge of the ban.

 

The Cripples.

By Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976).

Oil on canvas, 1949.

 

This from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine...

Attracted to the painting as voyeurs, we are tempted to essay fanciful diagnoses of the problems that afflict some of the ‘cripples’ that Lowry assembled in this composite painting, derived from sketches made at different times.

 

At the bottom right of the picture we see a man with no legs (an above-knee amputation on the right and a likely hindquarter amputation on the left) riding on a home-made cart. He is probably a war amputee and was well known in Manchester, where he used to sell small items on the corner of Deansgate and St Mary's Gate. Immediately above him in the middle background is a man in a grey coat and red scarf whose gait suggests that he may have a disorder such as cerebellar ataxia or Huntingdon's chorea. To his right is a very tall man with retrognathia, perhaps due to Marfan's syndrome.

 

In the middle foreground we see a man with crutches, who may have had a stroke - he has an extended, perhaps spastic, left leg with a possible equinus deformity and may have a contralateral facial palsy. Just behind him is a woman with hunched shoulders or a short neck; she looks as if she is wearing a permanent coat-hanger and has facial asymmetry, characteristics of Klippel-Feil syndrome, in which torticollis is also common.

 

At the bottom left is another man with crutches, this time because of a left above-knee amputation, also probably a war victim. Above him is a man with a left-sided hook prosthesis, presumably another war amputee. Talking to him is a man with a well-rounded gibbus, for which many possible causes can be suggested - tuberculosis, severe osteoarthritis, Forestier's disease (diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis), Scheuermann's disease (adolescent kyphosis) or ankylosing spondylitis.

 

In the middle ground a man in a bowler hat with varus knees walks away from the viewer, complemented by a lady to his right, facing the viewer, with valgus knees. The underlying pathology is likely to be osteoarthritis.

 

Of course, the point of Lowry's painting is not what the cripples are suffering from, but their very existence and the way in which the healthy on-lookers, mostly children, gaze at them with curiosity. Lowry once said, ‘I feel more strongly about these people than I ever did about the industrial scene. They are real people, sad people. I'm attracted to sadness and there are some very sad things. I feel like them.’ And look at the man in the focal centre of the painting, walking his dog. It has been suggested that this is Lowry himself, who may have suffered from Asperger's syndrome.3,4 Here he is depicted lost in thought, an emotional cripple, studiously not looking at all the physical cripples around him.

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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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