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Lot Essay
The present composition is a remarkable work which was first exhibited at one of Lowry's very first exhibitions and is one of his early compositions to show figures against a white background, the technique that he was to use for the rest of his life. Lowry told his close friend and would-be biographer Professor Hugh Maitland that 'it was the first time I was ever shown in public'. The exhibition lasted two weeks - and Lowry claimed later that he did not sell one picture. The exhibition is described by Shelley Rohde, the artist's biographer, 'Today many - if not all - of those unsold Lowrys of 1921 form a valued part of collections all over the world. Item No One in the catalogue was bequeathed to Salford City Art Gallery. Item No Two was a poetic oil which demonstrates some early experimentation with flake-white and is now called Sudden Illness [the present work]. Priced originally at 15 guineas, it was sold by the artist to the collector Monty Bloom in the '50s; by 1960 it's price had risen to £100 and in 1972 Bloom sold it a London Gallery for £4,000. Two days later, finding he 'missed it too much', he bought it back for £6,000. Another of those 1921 pictures, Hawker's Cart, is in the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, and Pit Disaster went to Geoffrey Bennett in Carlisle; A Doctor's Waiting Room was bought by Salford in 1959; and Coming Out of School was bought by the Duveen Fund for the Tate (see S. Rohde, op. cit., pp. 149, 152 and 154).
Lowry once remarked, 'Accidents interest me - I've a very queer mind you know. What fascinates me is the people they attract, the patterns those people form, and the atmosphere of tension when something has happened ... where there's a quarrel there's always a crowd ... It's a great draw. A quarrel or a body' (see Exhibition catalogue, L.S. Lowry, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1988, p. 53).
Michael Howard (loc. cit.) comments that, 'this frieze-like composition is a sombre reworking in an urban setting of the beach scenes of the 19th Century French painter, Boudin, an artist much admired by Lowry'.
Lowry once remarked, 'Accidents interest me - I've a very queer mind you know. What fascinates me is the people they attract, the patterns those people form, and the atmosphere of tension when something has happened ... where there's a quarrel there's always a crowd ... It's a great draw. A quarrel or a body' (see Exhibition catalogue, L.S. Lowry, Barbican Art Gallery, London, 1988, p. 53).
Michael Howard (loc. cit.) comments that, 'this frieze-like composition is a sombre reworking in an urban setting of the beach scenes of the 19th Century French painter, Boudin, an artist much admired by Lowry'.