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Lot Essay
'Few British painters have provided in their drawings so complete and revealing a conspectus of their aesthetic, intellectual, and intuitive objects, as L.S. Lowry. His drawings for the most part are intended to be complete in themselves … Lowry learned how to extract from the medium of pencil a rich, wide range of qualities. Even an approximation of ‘colour’ … In his industrial drawings, the artist gradually refined a composite townscape which was to be no place in particular, and yet all places of its kind. At the same time he was evolving a race of people; no particular people, and yet all people, of their kind.'
- Mervyn Levy
Executed in 1959, the present work depicts the Cumbrian fishing town of Maryport, situated on the Solway estuary. The town appears in a number of works by Lowry, including an oil painting depicting the same view (sold in these Rooms on 16 November 2007, lot 119, for £216,500); and Senhouse Street, Maryport, 1955 (sold in these Rooms, 4 June 2004, lot 70, for £498,050).
One of Lowry's connections with the town was through his friendship with the Reverend Geoffrey Bennett. Lowry and Geoffrey Bennett met in 1926 when Bennett worked as a clerk with Lowry's cousin, Grace Shephard, at the London and County Westminster Bank in Manchester. When Bennett married and moved to Cumbria, Lowry became a frequent guest. Bennett was ordinated into the Anglican Church in 1962 and become known to Lowry as the 'Reverend Gentleman'. When Lowry died in 1976, Reverend Bennett conducted the funeral service. In 1995, Christie's sold a collection of works from Geoffrey Bennett's estate.
The composition of Church on the Quay, Maryport is dominated by a dark church in the centre of the composition which looms imposingly over the small figures, animals and hay cart in the street below. The empty and subtly shaded sky recalls the starkness often found in Lowry’s industrial landscapes. In the bold composition and his assured use of the pencil, Lowry demonstrates his expertise as a fine draughtsman.