Factory-dotted skylines, smoking chimneys and stick-like figures. These are the images evoked by the mention of LS Lowry (1887 – 1976). The artist once said, ‘My ambition was to put the industrial scene on the map because nobody had seriously done it.’ I think we can agree that he succeeded.

Using his experience, skill and a limited palette, Lowry created works that took the everyday, the mundane and the bleak and transformed it into something special, exciting and beautiful.

Lowry didn’t restrict himself to industrial scenes. Over his career, he painted various subjects and themes, from seascapes and landscapes to portraits and even surreal images.

EMPLOYEE, STUDENT, ARTIST

With a love of drawing since childhood, Lowry enrolled in evening art classes as soon as he began earning an income. Employee by day and student by night, Lowry balanced working life with his artistic education for 20 years. Although he achieved recognition as an artist during his lifetime, he worked as a rent collector for most of his career, from 1910 until his retirement 42 years later.

Between 1905 and 1915 he studied at the Municipal College of Art where the French artist Adolphe Valette introduced him to Impressionism. Valette had a great impact on Lowry, as did Bernard Taylor who instructed Lowry at the Salford School of Art, which he attended from 1915 to 1925. Taylor’s comment that Lowry’s paintings were too dark lead him to start painting on a pure white background, a technique that endured throughout his career.

A PERSONAL STYLE

Lowry developed a realistic style, eschewing the influence of Impressionism which was a radical departure from the traditional style of painting. His breakthrough occurred in 1916 when he was living in Pendlebury, an industrial town in the borough of Salford in Northwest England. While waiting for a train, Lowry was suddenly struck by the image of workers spilling out of the Acme Spinning Company Mill as they left work for the day. Fascinated by the combination of people and their surroundings, he began experimenting depicting such scenes.

The artist turned to painting what was on his doorstep, capturing the industrial landscape of Salford and Lancashire county. He drew inspiration from the everyday, scenes he had seen a thousand times, but now looked at afresh.

Over the next few years Lowry developed a unique style. His paintings celebrated the industrialised north with their mills and terraced houses, factory workers and mothers with children populating the canvases.

Lowry believed artists should paint places they knew and his work became highly personalised. He spent time walking the streets of Salford and Manchester making sketches and he painted purely from experience.

RECOGNITION AND A NEW DIRECTION

Lowry’s work began to gain recognition during the 1920s and by 1930 he enjoyed his first solo exhibition in Manchester. In the same year, he painted Coming from the Mill (1930), one of his most characteristic mill scenes.

grow throughout the 1930s when his work was accepted by the Royal Academy of Arts and he held his first solo show in London at the Lefevre Gallery.

Despite his success and the admiration his industrial scenes achieved, Lowry turned his attention elsewhere in the 1950s as modernisation began to change the face of Northern England. He started painting small groups or lone f igures against a white background. These works, such as A Beggar (1965), depicted real characters Lowry observed and in this way the artist continued to distil the essence of Northern England and its people. Although Lowry considered these works some of his finest, they failed to capture the imagination of his audience in the same way his factory scenes had.

Lowry also created several figureless landscapes and seascapes during his career. In the 1960s, he frequented the Northeast of England, particularly Sunderland, where he often painted the view from his hotel room. Minimal to the point of abstraction, these works are far removed from his busy street scenes alive with hundreds of workers.

LOWRY’S LEGACY

Although far less prolific as he grew older, Lowry continued to paint mill scenes as late as 1972. His interest in industrial landscapes was rekindled during a trip to Wales, where visits to mining villages inspired some of his major late works, including Hillside in Wales (1962) and Bargoed (1965).

By the time of his death in 1976, Lowry had received national acclaim. However, he always harboured feelings of isolation and rejection from the initial lack of recognition his art received. Perhaps fittingly for a man who put the working class centre-stage, Lowry had turned down a knighthood in 1968 saying, ‘All my life I have felt most strongly against social distinction of any kind.’

The depth of public admiration for his work was illustrated just a few months after his death when his retrospective at the Royal Academy received record visitor numbers for a show by a 20th-century British artist.