House by the Sea

Lowry's mature landscapes, in marked contrast to his urban scenes present a barren almost sterile vision. He was determined to paint only the essentials of a landscape, cutting away everything that was not central to his meaning (see M. Howard, Lowry A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, p. 220). John Rothenstein, in his chapter on Lowry in Modern English Painters, 1956 wrote, 'Everything can go but this stark, bare rocky directness of statement, this alone makes poetry today'.

In the present work Lowry explores the tension of a 'lonely landscape'; a stark, solitary house centred in the picture space, the sea providing the distant, low horizon. Initially isolated, totally self-contained and empty, the house is in fact welcoming, a family approaching as if drawn by a magnet towards the woman in the open doorway. The melancholy is lifted by the small but resolute figures, the emphatic use of white imbuing the scene with an almost dreamlike atmosphere.