Rare works by L.S. Lowry: his first depiction of a sporting crowd and one of only a handful of paintings he made of the Cotswolds

Going to the Match (1928)

Laurence Stephen Lowry lived in an area of Greater Manchester called Pendlebury. As a boy, he had been encouraged to take up sport by his father, who in his spare time ran a youth football team. Although he never excelled as a player, Lowry did maintain an artistic interest in sport throughout his life.

Which is to say, he frequently depicted crowds making their way to or from a match, or actually attending one. These are among his most admired paintings. In 2022, Going to the Match (1953) — a scene capturing the mass arrival of fans at a football ground — became the most expensive work by Lowry ever sold at auction, when it fetched £7,846,500 at Christie’s in London.

A painting of the same name is being offered at the same venue in the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale on 22 October 2025. It is the artist’s earliest picture of a sporting crowd, dating from 1928, and features fans en route to a rugby match — thought to have been a derby between Lowry’s local teams, Swinton Lions and Salford Red Devils.

They walk from right to left — towards the entrance to the ground, which is out of view. The pitch occupies a small part of the composition, revealed by two tall sets of rugby posts rising above a perimeter fence.

The red flag flying beside it suggests that this might be Salford’s home ground — as does the preponderance of red scarves worn by members of the crowd. (Just two or three individuals can be seen wearing blue, Swinton’s playing colour.)

‘My ambition,’ Lowry once said, ‘was to put the industrial scene on the map, because nobody [before] had done it seriously.’ For Lowry, that scene specifically meant the urban landscape of Lancashire in north-west England, which he inhabited his entire life: one synonymous with terraced houses, mills and factories. In many celebrated paintings — for example, Going to Work — he captured workers pouring in and out of such factories.

The typical working week lasted five-and-a-half days, ending at noon on Saturday. After an hour or so’s refreshment in the pub, the workers headed to watch a sports match (football or rugby league in the winter, cricket in the summer). In Lowry’s part of England, sports stadiums were commonly found close to industrial buildings — and such is the case in Going to the Match.

It’s clearly a windy day: the aforementioned red flag is blowing hard, as is black smoke from the chimney stack above the large mill. The wind blows into the faces of the match-goers, but they press forward unflinchingly regardless. Lowry conveys the allure that the game has for these people, and the communal sense of purpose it gives them at the end of a hard week at work.

In sporting crowds the artist found a subject that would engage him across most of his career. Interestingly, however, Going to the Match is one of only two known paintings he did of a crowd for a rugby league game. He painted the other, a smaller work entitled Coming from the Match, in 1959.

Whether the context was professional or recreational, Lowry was a master at capturing people moving en masse. In the picture coming to auction, all the men are capped, some with their hands in their jacket pockets. One walks with a stick, one beckons a friend, and another has a cigarette in his mouth.

A boy in shorts hurries along at the rear, presumably keen to catch up with an adult family member who will buy him his ticket to the match.

Bourton-on-the-Water (1947)

Two years after painting Going to the Match, Lowry was commissioned to provide the illustrations for a book written by his friend Harold Timperley and published by Jonathan Cape. A Cotswold Book was a guide to the affluent Cotswolds area of southern England. Lowry produced 12 drawings for it, depicting local places of interest.

He was enchanted, among other things, by the honey-coloured stone of the buildings — so much so that he returned to the area in the late 1940s for what he called several ‘very good’ visits. ‘The villages are… quaint,’ he wrote in a letter at that time to fellow artist David Carr. ‘The buildings are mostly of stone, [which] is very warm — I noticed that at once, as quite different from the stone in Lancashire… which is cold and hard and bleak.’

He produced five known oil paintings on these visits — one of which, Stow-on-the-Wold, was sold at Christie’s in London in 2011.

Another, Bourton-on-the-Water, features in the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale on 22 October. It captures the eponymous Cotswolds village, widely regarded as one of the most picturesque in Britain.

Running through the village’s centre is the River Windrush — crossed by a number of charming pedestrian bridges. Hence Bourton-on-the-Water’s nickname, the ‘Venice of the Cotswolds’. From there, the Windrush meanders its way south-eastwards for roughly 25 miles before flowing into the River Thames.

Lowry painted a scene of serenity and relaxation. Villagers quietly go about their activities by the riverside — and they’re far sparser than the throngs in his trademark scenes in the industrial north. Many of them walk dogs; some engage in casual conversation.

The forward lean of the fans in Going to the Match is replaced by the upright stance adopted by figures here, suggestive of lives being led with a certain ease.

Lowry rarely painted scenes that weren’t of the north of England. ‘You don’t need to travel far to find interesting things to paint,’ he once said. Part of what makes Bourton-on-the-Water remarkable is the way he generated an atmosphere very different from usual, while preserving all the hallmarks of his artistic style — from the economy of line and restrained palette to the rhythmic scattering of figures.

The two works coming to Christie’s are set in highly contrasting parts of Britain. Both, however, capture rich slices of British life in the first half of the 20th century — as seen through the sensitive and observant eyes of L.S. Lowry.

The Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale takes place on 22 October 2025, followed by the Day Sale on 23 October. The sales will be on view 18-22 October at Christie’s in London

Related artists: Laurence Stephen Lowry