Two Men on a Park Bench

Monty Bloom's passion for the work of L.S. Lowry began by chance when he caught the end of John Read's 1958 documentary for the BBC, Artist into film. Bloom, a successful businessman from Southport, had been born in the Rhondda Valley in Wales and the film prompted him to approach Ted Frape, the curator at Salford City Art Gallery, to commission Lowry to paint an industrial landscape that would remind Bloom of his childhood home. The artist and patron later met at the Kalman Gallery in Manchester and a visit to the artist's studio ensued. On seeing the mass of paintings there, Bloom found that he preferred Lowry's figure studies to the industrial landscapes and bought four paintings on the spot. Lowry had now found a patron for the pictures that he really wanted to paint, the people that he observed on the streets of Manchester, but which he found difficult to sell with Reid and Lefevre, his dealers in London. A life-long friendship commenced between the two men, and at one time, Bloom owned over over one hundred paintings.

Lowry said of the tramps that feature in his paintings from the 1960s: 'I wanted to show people that there were these people about. And I was sorry for them, and at the same time realising that there was no need to be sorry because they were quite in a world of their own' (see exhibition catalogue, L.S. Lowry, London, Barbican Art Gallery, 1988, p. 74).