Industrial Scene

Lowry's urban drawings rarely depict a specific place, rather they are amalgamations of various areas and buildings with which he had become intimately acquainted over the years. His improvised compositions were developed over prolonged periods of time until, by adding and subtracting chimneys, buildings and people, he felt a satisfactory formal balance had been achieved between his technical means, his subject matter and his private needs. His urban views are presented with a certain detachment, and resemble nothing so much as a series of stage settings in which his figures appear as puppets directed by an invisible but all-powerful puppet-master. He presents the city as spectacle, and yet at the same time sets himself apart from it. His stated desire to paint himself into what absorbed him was an impossibility; he as artist and we as viewers are necessarily forever outside these painted scenes, which are manipulated and organised for our consumption (see M. Howard, Lowry A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, pp. 127-128).