Lowry's ordinary home and amazing gallery

Laurence Lowry (1887–1976) was born in Stretford Lancs. In 1905 the teenager was a student at the Manchester Municipal College of Art, where he studied under the French Impressionist artist Adolphe Valette. Valette also put Lowry in touch with current artistic developments in Paris.

By 1915 Lowry was studying at the Salford School of Art. It was here he mastered industrial landscapes and began to establish his unique style. Lowry eventually became famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial north­ of England of the early C20th. His distinc­tive paintings were best known for dullish cityscapes, and match-stick humans and animals. One of his favourite districts to paint was Salford, an area he knew very well. 

Lowry, 
Coming Out of School, 1927,
35 x 54 cm,
Tate

Often times his images were crowded with people, but they were rushing and isolated individuals, not people having a wonderful time. In 1939 John Rothenstein, then Director of the Tate Gallery, visited Lowry's first solo exhibition in London, saying: 'I stood in the gallery marvelling at the accuracy of the mirror that this to me unknown painter had held up to the bleakness, the obsolete shabbiness, the grimy fogboundness, the grimness of northern industrial England”.

In 1948 Lowry had enough money to buy a modest home in Mottram, Greater Manchester called The Elms. It was not the most attractive house in the world, but as he had always remained single, there was never any need to move to a nicer place. The dining room was his studio and most of the wall space was covered with paintings and drawings completed during his time there. Now that the home has been given Listed Status, the new owners plan to restore the staircase which winds up the centre of the house and has lots of intricate detailing. An original cast iron stove, original doors, window shutters and floorboards will be renovated and the fireplace will move back from the lounge back to its original location in Lowry’s bedroom.

The Elms, Mottram 
in Greater Manchester 

In the 1950s, the artist liked to spent his holidays at the Seaburn Hotel up in Sunderland, focusing on scenes of local ports and coal mines. And he holidayed often in Berwick Upon Tweed. He must have really loved the northern industrial scenes.. since he painted them often. In fact while Lowry composed many of his northern views as imaginative reconstructions of different places, some were named after specific streets. Art dealer Richard Green noted that Coronation Street 1957 is the same street in Salford after which the famous, eponymous TV soap opera was named three years later. Was this life copying art or art copying life?

Lowry often befriended and bought works from young artists he admired, including James Ish­erwood whose works hung on the Mottram studio wall. He supp­orted other young careers by buying several pictures that he gave to museums. But the paintings he bought for his own pleasure were not contemporary. When the money started to roll in for his own works, Lowry purchased a number of works by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 –1882). How strange that an artist who painted stylised, lonely people in tough northern cityscapes should be particularly inspired by a sensual Victorian Pre-Raphaelite.

Lowry

The Fever Van 1935

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Lowry died in 1976 aged 88, just a few months before an important and successful exhibition of his work was held at London's Royal Academy. The artist was buried in Manchester, leaving a very large estate, valued at £300,000 plus many works of art. Since then, a col­lection of Lowry's work has been put on permanent public display in a newly built art theatre and gallery complex, The Lowry, on Pier 8 Salford Quays Manchester. The complex contains 2,000 square metres of gallery space displaying 400 of Lowry's paintings plus other artists' work. It was all collected by Salford Museum and Art Gallery from the 1930s on, but the works didn't move into the new Manchester complex until it opened in 2000.

Amongst the other gall­eries that have since organised retrospectives of his works, Tate Britain Millbank is showing Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life from June-October 2013. The Tate exhibition has 38 of his best loved works, starting from his 1934 works.

The Lowry theatre and gallery complex 
in Salford Quays, Manchester

Lowry, in his own time and since, has divided the critics into two camps. Supporters believed his paintings were authentic images of modern life, the only works to truly address the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the shabby northern half of England. The detractors believed his works were untutored, repetitive, ugly, naive and lazy.

In discussing the painting The Rival Candidate (1942, Art Gallery of Western Australia), Kitty Hauser adds some facts from Lowry's life that may have explained his unique style. Firstly the only person whose approval he craved was his highly controlling, bed-bound mother who had loathed giving birth to her only child. To repay his mother, Laurence had nursed her day and night from the time she had become a widow in 1932 until she died in 1939. Secondly Lowry worked as a rent collector for 42 years,  a lonely position which may have accounted for the detached way he painted his busy scenes. If he had time for painting, it was only at night or on weekends.

Michael Howard wrote Lowry: a Visionary Artist, showing how the painter's apparent naivety was a deliberate mask to a complex character.  Carol Ann Lowry, the painter's unrelated adoptive god daughter, was one of the several young girls Lowry befriended, and who helped to fuel his artistic fantasies. Lowry's extensive library held a series of his obsessively reworked erotic paintings; this was not what Howard had expected from the northern heritage industry's favourite icon.