LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY, R.A. (1887-1976)
LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY, R.A. (1887-1976)
LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY, R.A. (1887-1976)
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Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY, R.A. (1887-1976)

Mill Gates

Details
LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY, R.A. (1887-1976)
Mill Gates
signed and dated 'L.S. Lowry 1954' (lower right)
pencil on paper
11 x 15 in. (27.9 x 38.1 cm.)
Executed in 1954.
Provenance
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 6 November 1998, lot 74.
with Richard Green, London, where purchased by the previous owner in August 2000.
Their sale; Sotheby's, London, 12 June 2018, lot 1, where purchased by the present owner.
Literature
Exhibition catalogue, LS Lowry, London, Richard Green, 2000, n.p., no. 6, illustrated.
Exhibited
London, Richard Green, LS Lowry, April - May 2000, no. 6.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

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Lot Essay

Lowry’s mill scenes are dominated by the factory buildings and structures that he knew from his youth, when he made a daily journey to work each day, and experienced the hustle and bustle, the ebb and flow of a smoky, heavily populated metropolis. There is a timelessness to Lowry’s view of the city, even as it changed in the face of the post-war years of regeneration and renewal; Lowry was able to remove the new structures from his vision and continued to find buildings in his art that no longer existed anywhere other than in his own imagination.

In the present work, Lowry’s cast of characters are varied in execution. In the foreground are the large-scale figures - distinctive individuals walking their dogs or pushing their prams, some carrying bags, and walking with purpose. In the middle distance, the workers are gradually reduced in size as they become fleeting impressions of walking figures, eventually represented by gentle smudges of the pencil as they arrive at the mill which seems to swallow them up and absorb them completely.

Unlike many artists, Lowry’s drawings typically function as stand-alone creations, and he employed very similar working methods and stylistic effects in both painting and drawing. Mervyn Levy has noted that Lowry’s drawings 'are seldom planned as a preparation for painting, and ... have always run distinct, if parallel, courses' (M. Levy, The Drawings of L.S. Lowry, Public and Private, Cory, Adams and Mackay, London, 1963, p. 7).

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