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Lot Essay
'It has been said that Lowry, stimulated by an affection for the place and its people, transformed the ugliness of the Northern streets into a fairyland without telling lies about it, but Lowry himself firmly believed that the quality of beauty was there and that nobody would have seen it unless he had painted it' (see D. McLean, L.S. Lowry, London, 1978, p. 24).
Typical of Lowry's industrial scenes, the present work is a composite landscape, which Lowry would have built up over an initial ground of flake white paint. Dating from 1944, A Footbridge, is painted from an elevated viewpoint, with receeding horizontal planes dividing the picture at almost regular intervals up to the horizon, just under half way up the composition. The work contains many familiar elements: the solitary figures lined up along the foreground; the purposeful dogs; long rows of identical housing; rolling green hills; smoking factory chimneys and towering architectural features in the background. Mervyn Levy comments that Lowry's vision, 'remains characteristically indigenous. It is phlegmatic, lightly romantic, superbly eccentric. The artist has never left the shores of his own country. 'My three most cherished records' he says 'are the fact that I have never been abroad, never had a telephone, and never owned a motor car'. He qualifies his mistrust of foreign travel on the grounds that he fears 'the heat, the oil, and the fat.' Yet in spite of all these 'deficiencies' in his education as a painter, the painter has established a vision of the north which is unique and unforgettable. It is doubtful if, having visited the Lancashire scene and related it to Lowry's painting, one could ever think of it again in separation of his art ... To see suddenly and for the first time with his eyes, were as though a cataract had been removed from one's sight to reveal with startling clearness the marvellous pattern of buildings and chimney stacks and smoke and winding streets and cool, distant perspectives, and the slow thread of figures weaving their way through the great tapestry. It is a pure and simple vision, personal, yet impersonal; a first vision of the world: the vision of our lost innocence' (see Painters of Today L.S. Lowry, London, 1961, p. 13).
The present work has never been since in public since it was purchased by the present owner directly from Lowry's dealers in 1945 (fig. 1).
Typical of Lowry's industrial scenes, the present work is a composite landscape, which Lowry would have built up over an initial ground of flake white paint. Dating from 1944, A Footbridge, is painted from an elevated viewpoint, with receeding horizontal planes dividing the picture at almost regular intervals up to the horizon, just under half way up the composition. The work contains many familiar elements: the solitary figures lined up along the foreground; the purposeful dogs; long rows of identical housing; rolling green hills; smoking factory chimneys and towering architectural features in the background. Mervyn Levy comments that Lowry's vision, 'remains characteristically indigenous. It is phlegmatic, lightly romantic, superbly eccentric. The artist has never left the shores of his own country. 'My three most cherished records' he says 'are the fact that I have never been abroad, never had a telephone, and never owned a motor car'. He qualifies his mistrust of foreign travel on the grounds that he fears 'the heat, the oil, and the fat.' Yet in spite of all these 'deficiencies' in his education as a painter, the painter has established a vision of the north which is unique and unforgettable. It is doubtful if, having visited the Lancashire scene and related it to Lowry's painting, one could ever think of it again in separation of his art ... To see suddenly and for the first time with his eyes, were as though a cataract had been removed from one's sight to reveal with startling clearness the marvellous pattern of buildings and chimney stacks and smoke and winding streets and cool, distant perspectives, and the slow thread of figures weaving their way through the great tapestry. It is a pure and simple vision, personal, yet impersonal; a first vision of the world: the vision of our lost innocence' (see Painters of Today L.S. Lowry, London, 1961, p. 13).
The present work has never been since in public since it was purchased by the present owner directly from Lowry's dealers in 1945 (fig. 1).