DIMENSIONS: (unframed) 4.3 x 5.5 in./ 11.0 x 14.0 cm
SIGNATURE: Signed lower right L. S. Lowry and dated ’72.
MEDIUM: Biro pen on paper
To Lunch, The Manchester Club.
P.O.A.
Out Of Stock
As a young boy, Lowry lived in the leafy Manchester suburb of Victoria Park. Lack of finances resulted in the family then having to move to Station Road, Pendlebury, Salford – a far more industrial landscape than Lowry had been used to. Lowry would recall “At first I detested it, and then, after years I got pretty interested in it, then obsessed by it.”
The residents of Manchester are represented here in a fantastical world with strange mythical creatures going about their day alongside them. This special work was featured on BBC Antiques Roadshow on 6th November 2010 and was chosen by Fiona Bruce as one of her top ten items that had ever appeared on the show. In the Seventies, the father of the man who owned it used to go to the Manchester club Lowry frequented. The waitresses would bring their children in and the artist would do doodles for them. The owner’s father asked one of the waitresses if they could get Lowry to sign one of the pictures for him, which he did.
Private Collection, United Kingdom
Biography
Laurence Stephen Lowry was an English artist born on Barrett Street, Stretford, in Lancashire. Many of his drawings and paintings depict nearby Salford and the surrounding areas, including Pendlebury, which is where he lived and worked for over 40 years.
Lowry studied both at the Manchester Academy of Fine Art and at Salford Royal Technical College in Peel Park, close to where he lived. Tutored by the likes of the famed French impressionist Adolphe Valette, and inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite artists Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti, Lowry understood how the power of art and artists could influence the representation of landscapes and, in particular, the modern city. Lowry felt that drawings were as hard to do as painting. He worked the surface of his drawings by smudging, erasing and rubbing the pencil lines on his paper to build the atmosphere of the drawing. Lowry developed his own individual style, gathering inspiration from the surrounding landscape of busy cotton mills, terraced houses and the bustle of the working classes.
Best known for his depictions of industrial Manchester and Salford and “matchstick men,” his work covers a wide range of subject matter including seascapes, landscapes and portraits, among which are the oil paintings of his mother and father which he kept on display in his home throughout his life
L.S Lowry has been one of the biggest British successes in the last ten years moving out of obscurity to a key position in British Art. His work can now be found in museums and private collections across the globe, including the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, The Imperial War Museum in London, the MOMA in New York and the Tate in London. In 2013, Tate Britain held a retrospective of his work, the first one since his death.
