Head of a man

Lowry's father, Robert, died in 1932, leaving his son to care for his mother, Elizabeth, a bed-ridden invalid who required his constant attention. He worked full-time at the Pall Mall Property Company in Manchester but nursed his mother without help, still having to find the time for his painting and drawing, often working into the early hours of the morning. He was emotionally and physically drained during this period of his life and began to produce a series of heads which reflect the constant stress and tension under which he lived. The artist remarked to Monty Bloom: 'I put myself into a lot of these heads, they were reflections of my feelings at the time'.

Comparable works to Head of a man are Man with Red Eyes, 1938 (The Lowry) and Young Man, 1938 (private collection). In all three works, a male figure stares straight out of the canvas and all three are types of self-portraits. They were not direct representations of the artist but more representative of how he was feeling at this difficult time in his life. He said about Man with Red Eyes: 'I was simply letting off steam. My mother was bedfast. I started a big self-portrait. Well, it started as a self-portrait. I thought, "What's the use of it? I don't want it and nobody else will." I turned it into a grotesque head. I'm glad I did it. I like it better than a self-portrait. I seemed to want to make it as grotesque as possible. All the paintings of that period were done under stress and tension and they were all based on myself. In all those heads of the late 30s I was trying to make them as grim as possible. I reflected myself in those pictures' (see A. Kalman, L.S. Lowry: Conversation Pieces, London, 2003, p. 71).