Hello, my name is Paul Priestley, welcome to Artist in School the home of art history
for young people and interested amateurs. Today we are going to be looking at an artist
from my part of the world, the north of England. His name is Laurence Stephen Lowry, better
known as L. S. Lowry. Wonderful artist, let’s find out about him.
1887 was the year of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, it was also the year of the Royal
Jubilee exhibition held in Old Trafford, Manchester. On Tuesday 1st November it was announced in
the local press in Manchester, in northern England, that a total of four and 1/2 million
visitors had passed through the gates of the exhibition. What wasn’t announced was Elizabeth
Lowry, the wife of estate agent Robert Lowry, had given birth to a boy, Laurence Stephen,
or Lawrie as he became known. He was a big boy with big hands, big feet and a big head.
He was clumsy and far from the delicate daughter his mother really wanted. She showed him little
affection and even went as far as dressing him in pretty white frocks, which looked ridiculous
on such a big toddler. Lowry was a very shy boy. When he went to
Sunday school, where his mother played piano, he would often hide behind her skirt. Eventually,
he was sent to private school, but hated it. He once wrote, ‘I have no really happy memories
of childhood, it was not a nice time.’ Lowry was an outsider and a loner who suffered
from Asperger’s syndrome and was much happier in his own company although he did have a
number of friends. He projected an image of a jovial, self-effacing individual, but he
was often depressed and very lonely. He never married, he found relationships almost impossible
and women unfathomable. The snobbish London art establishment never took him very seriously,
in fact, the art critic Brian Sewell once called him a cloth capped nincompoop.
Lawrence Stephen Lowry’s parents Robert and Elizabeth lived in a modest semi-detached
house in Barrett Street, Old Trafford, Manchester. Elizabeth, Lowry’s mother had health issues
and was always ready to voice her displeasure. To her life was a big let-down with neither
her husband or her son, living up to her hopes and expectations. Perhaps this is why in 1898,
Robert moved the family to Victoria, a very smart part of Manchester. The rent for the
new house was £26, a year £10 a year more than Barrett St, and more than he could actually
afford. From childhood Lowry loved drawing and doodling,
but his mother, who craved convention and conformity had different ideas. She wanted
Lowry to be a success in business, particularly as Manchester, then known as Cottonopolis,
was booming. As far as his mother was concerned there was simply no question of Lowry being
allowed to follow the life he wanted. His father thought he should get a job as
a clerk; his mother was not impressed. But in 1903 he did become a clerk for Thomas Aldred
and Sons, Chartered Accountants in Manchester. It was not long before he became frustrated
at not being allowed to become an artist, so he was sent for art lessons with his uncle
Tom, a failed Royal Academy student, who was teaching locally.
Around this time his aunt suggested he should go to art school, Lowry said later, ‘I'll
try anything once, that's how it happened, because I wasn't fit to do anything else.’
All the family knew what he wanted to do, but his mother would have nothing to do with
it. However, in 1905 he was accepted as an evening student at Manchester School of Art
to study antique and free hand drawing. He soon became inspired by the French tutor of
drawing, Adolphe Valette, so he joined his life class. Lowry wasn't a great draughtsman,
but he didn't lack enthusiasm. He was regarded as an oddity and Valette would often look
at his work, pat him on the shoulder and smile, before turning and walking away. Lowry attended
life classes at the art school for 12 years. In May 1909 the family moved from Victoria
Park to the industrial part of Pendlebury after his father, Robert had lost his job.
His mother, Elizabeth, saw this as a dissent into the world of the common man. She hated
the new house. A few months later Lowry was sacked from his job. But in March 1910 at
the age of 23, he began work for the Pall Mall property company as a rent collector
on 22 shillings a week. The job, walking the industrial streets of Pendlebury and its surroundings
for hours a day had a profound effect on him. He said, ‘nobody complained that I took
three days to collect the rent. when it could have been done in two, because I was drawing.
As long as you didn't fiddle the books or pocket the rent, you had a job for life.’
He worked for the company for 42 years. In all the years he worked for the Pall Mall
property company he rarely referred to his art with colleagues. His mother continually
criticised his painting calling it, ugly, sordid, devoid of beauty and totally unnecessary.
The family’s attitude was, ‘if it keeps him out of trouble, as he is not fit to do
anything else, so let him get on with it.’ After leaving the Manchester art school after
12 years, as he said, ‘by popular demand.’ He started in 1915 to attend evening classes
at the Salford School of Art. Shortly after starting, he took a couple of his paintings
to show to the life class tutor, a man called Bernard Taylor, who was also the art critic
of the Manchester Guardian. He looked at the paintings and said, ‘they look dingy, you
should be able to do better than that.’ Lowry asked him, ‘how do I do that?’ Taylor
replied, ‘That’s for you to find out.’ Lowry was irate, but he just picked up his
paintings and trundled off. He went home and immediately painted two canvases of dark figures
on white backgrounds, just plain flake white. Lowry said, ‘I was very angry, very cross,
I'll show the old bird, I took my paintings back and plonked them in front of him and
said, what do you think?’ Taylor turned to him and said, ‘that's right, that's perfectly
right.’ In October 1921 he showed 25 oils and two
pastels with an amateur group of painters. He didn't sell a single picture. However,
the Manchester Guardian wrote in their review of the exhibition, ‘Mr Lowry has a very
interesting and individual outlook, and interprets street scenes of Manchester with technical
means as yet imperfect, but with real imagination.’ His mother commented that the art critic didn’t
know what he was talking about, if he saw merit in those paintings. Nevertheless, the
review gave Lowry the confidence to carry on.
In 1926 the Manchester Guardian newspaper published a supplement to celebrate Civic
Week and asked Lowry for permission to reproduce three of his pictures. The literary editor,
Arthur Wallace, saw them and was so impressed he asked to buy one. Lowry said, ‘and he
did buy one, so I threw in another with a note asking him to accept it as a souvenir.’
Around this time the director of the Oldham Art Gallery introduced him to Daisy Jewel,
the head of Framing at a Gallery in London. She loved his paintings and over the next
ten years supported his gradual emergence on the London art scene.
The 1930’s though were a struggle, he had no emotional support at home and despite numerous
exhibitions in Canada, Paris, Manchester and many galleries in the North of England, he
sold very few paintings. He said himself, ‘I'd spent 30 years painting pictures nobody
wanted.’ Above all he craved to be appreciated, especially by his mother, but she reviled,
rejected and ridiculed his work. His peers laughed at him and they laughed at his work
too. In 1930 Lowry had a one man show in Manchester
of 25 drawings and small paintings. They all sold, but only for £3 or £4 each. The City
art gallery bought, ‘Stony Brow’ and two months later bought, ‘An Accident’ for
£21, having knocked the price down from £30. The exhibition was a success, but Lowry thought
the gallery had priced his work too low. In 1932 Lowry’s father died leaving huge
debts, which Lowry himself promised to pay off, and for the next seven years his 73 year
old mother became bed fast, meaning she took to her bed permanently. From there she completely
ruled Lowry’s life, constantly demanding his attention. He would only get to his painting
room after 11.00pm after she had settled. Not surprisingly, there followed years of
isolation and growing despair which he reflected in his paintings. The derelict buildings and
wastelands were almost mirrors of himself. In 1938 he painted ‘Head of a Man’ which
began as a self-portrait but was turned into a grotesque head. He was later to say that
‘all the paintings of that period were done under stress and tension and they were all
based on myself.’ Also, in 1938 Daisy Jewel persuaded the director
of the Lefevre gallery in new Bond Street London to show some of Lowry’s paintings.
He exhibited a dozen in early 1939 and they all sold, attracting a large number of reviews
in the national press. His mother was not impressed, but the Tate Gallery was and they
bought ‘Dwellings, Ordsall Lane’ for 15 pounds, but didn't display it for 20 years.
Lowry took this personally, believing they didn’t really want the painting.
The person he really wanted to impress more than any other, his mother, and she died in
October 1939 and Lowry painted, ‘The Bedroom, Pendlebury’ in memory of the long hours
he spent looking after her. After she died he said, ‘she did not understand my painting,
but she understood me and that was enough.’ After she died, he said, ‘I lost all interest,
continuing to paint was my only Salvation.’ Lowry was 52 when his mother died. He stayed
in the house, alone and lonely for the next 9 years. It was his sanctuary, full of cobwebs
and splattered paint. He had no wife, but he did adopt a number of young female companions
who he mentored and paid to go through art college. He referred to them collectively
as Ann. A young girl Carol Ann Lowry, no relation, was one of these girls. She had written to
him in 1957, saying she had an interest in art and, since they shared a surname, would
he offer her advice? He took her to galleries and paid for her education through art college.
Years later Carol said, ‘he always behaved immaculately, he was always invariably extremely
circumspect in his behaviour towards me.’ In the 1940s he became an official war artist;
he drew the ruin shells of bombed outbuildings which strongly effected himself emotionally.
His paintings sold for as much as £60.00 each, more than many people earned in a month.
But he lived on his own and you can see from these pictures how his own loneliness is reflected
in the paintings. By 1948, he was earning good money as a painter,
so he moved house to the more affluent village of Mottram-in-Longdendale, near Manchester.
He began collecting works by other artists that he admired, particularly the Pre-Raphaelite
painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1951, he confessed to a psychiatrist friend
how he would stare for hours at, 'empty houses with empty windows standing in isolation on
derelict streets...I saw in those desolate buildings an image of myself.’
As the 1950s progressed and the industrial north of England was modernised, Lowry lost
interest in his surroundings and began to concentrate almost entirely on figures silhouetted
against white backgrounds, occasionally they would be standing on a hint of a pavement,
or near the ghost of a wall, but frequently they looked as though they were suspended
in time and space. With virtually all his paintings you get the impression that he is
simply the observer, he is never part of what is going on. He loved observing individuals
like these here. Women conversing while children look bored. The man walking past the couple
and glancing back at the attractive wife. The man asleep on a wall. He loved to observe
the minutiae of life. Lowry had also painted landscapes and seascapes
for many years and in the 1960s he made repeated visits to the north east of England, particularly
to Sunderland. Many of his empty seascapes from this time are based on the view from
his room at the Seaburn Hotel where he was a regular visitor.
In 1976 he was given a one-man exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. This was a
major achievement, as very few living artists are given this accolade. But as he often said
about his own success,’ it all came too late.’ Which is rather prophetic because
on 23 February 1976 Lowry died of pneumonia at Woods Hospital in Glossop, Derbyshire following
a stroke at his home. He died as he lived, alone, with dignity, humour and courage. His
Royal Academy exhibition opened on the 4th September 1976, six months after he died.
It was a major success and was one of the most popular Royal Academy shows of the 20th
century. Some weeks after Lowry died, Carol Ann Lowry
was summoned to a vault beneath the NatWest bank in Manchester by the executors of Lowry's
will. She was informed that he had left his entire fortune of about £300,000 to her.
Finally, if you ever find yourself in Manchester take a trip to Sam’s Chop House, where Lowry
often enjoyed a drink and have a chat with him. Alternatively, you could visit Mottram-in
Longdendale, in Lancashire and sit on a bench with him and watch the world go by, much as
he would have done. Thank you for watching Artist in School, I
hope you have really enjoyed learning all about L. S. Lowry, an interesting artist.
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