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Lot Essay
Lowry was fascinated by the bizarre and grotesque. In the present work he has depicted a strange, solitary woman, clothed head-to-toe in black with only her nose and pointed chin visible. Her isolation is all the more evident as it is contrasted with groups of figures depicted on the other side of the iron railings. Michael Howard locates Lowry's interest in the grotesque as part of the wider European tradition, commenting: 'Far from being the sad obsession of an isolated individual, the notion of the grotesque, so apparent in these paintings, is a significant element within both mainstream and avant-garde European culture. If Lowry's early industrial scenes recall the literary work of Greenwood and Orwell, after the mid-Thirties his work increasingly approaches the bleak world view of Samuel Beckett ... It [Lowry's work] may be compared with the paintings of George Grosz and Otto Dix in Germany and the writings of the Italian playwright Pirandello, whose Six Characters in Search of an Author held such a fascination for the artist. These visions of a world populated by disconnected, isolated individual people, in which poignancy and bitter humour co-mingle, occurs also in the writings of Harold Pinter' (see M. Howard, Lowry: A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, pp. 166-8).
When Lowry was interviewed by Edwin Mullins ('My Lonely Life', Sunday Telegraph, 20 November 1966), he commented, 'There's a grotesque streak in me and I can't help it. My characters? They are all people you might see in a park ... They are real people, sad people ... I'm attracted to sadness, and there are some very sad things'.
When Lowry was interviewed by Edwin Mullins ('My Lonely Life', Sunday Telegraph, 20 November 1966), he commented, 'There's a grotesque streak in me and I can't help it. My characters? They are all people you might see in a park ... They are real people, sad people ... I'm attracted to sadness, and there are some very sad things'.