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拍品專文
This cheerful depiction of a woman and two dogs, painted in the latter part of L.S. Lowry’s career, represents a departure from the depictions of crowds that characterised much of his earlier work. Before the war, Lowry had concentrated on the industrial buildings in his art and the people that he painted in his cityscapes were small and lacking much particular detail, often even reduced to flecks of paint from his brush, to convey a sense of urgency in the monotony of their grinding daily lives. As the city changed after post war regeneration, Lowry began to focus on and to feature the people instead. Gradually increasing in size and status, by 1970, his figures are large and detailed enough to feature as the subject of a painting.
Woman with Dogs stands in stark contrast with the relatively few portraits that Lowry completed earlier in his career. As T.J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner have observed, in ‘works like A Manchester Man of 1936-7, Unemployed, from 1937, and Firewatcher, completed in 1941 [...] each “portrait” is meant to crystallise a specific form of contemporary labour, at a time when work was scarce’ (T.J. Clark and A.M. Wagner, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, London, 2013, pp. 90-91). These earlier portraits are all heavily contoured and their subjects wear serious expressions, whereas the woman depicted in the present work appears to be smiling, and Lowry provides further levity through the more two-dimensional handling. In some of his other individual portraits, Lowry paints a horizontal line behind the figures to give a more concrete sense of depth, but here the artist removes this element, opting for a flatter, less defined impression - setting the woman and dogs against his trademark white background.
Lowry’s fascination with the use of flake white paint began after Bernard Taylor, Lowry’s tutor at Salford School of Art and art critic for the Manchester Guardian, suggested his paintings were too dark in tone. Lowry was bewitched by the way white paint had a life of its own, far beyond his own control. He enjoyed the effect of the transformation of white paint over time, particularly as it aided his representation of the smoky skies in and around Manchester. Michael Leber and Judith Sandling comment on Lowry’s discovery of this evolution of the white pigment: ‘He used pure flake white to produce the base of his paintings and found, in an experiment he undertook with the assistance of his father, that over a period the “dead white … had turned a beautifully creamy grey-white”’ (M. Leber and J. Sandling, L.S. Lowry, Oxford, 1987, p. 28).
Woman with Dogs stands in stark contrast with the relatively few portraits that Lowry completed earlier in his career. As T.J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner have observed, in ‘works like A Manchester Man of 1936-7, Unemployed, from 1937, and Firewatcher, completed in 1941 [...] each “portrait” is meant to crystallise a specific form of contemporary labour, at a time when work was scarce’ (T.J. Clark and A.M. Wagner, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, London, 2013, pp. 90-91). These earlier portraits are all heavily contoured and their subjects wear serious expressions, whereas the woman depicted in the present work appears to be smiling, and Lowry provides further levity through the more two-dimensional handling. In some of his other individual portraits, Lowry paints a horizontal line behind the figures to give a more concrete sense of depth, but here the artist removes this element, opting for a flatter, less defined impression - setting the woman and dogs against his trademark white background.
Lowry’s fascination with the use of flake white paint began after Bernard Taylor, Lowry’s tutor at Salford School of Art and art critic for the Manchester Guardian, suggested his paintings were too dark in tone. Lowry was bewitched by the way white paint had a life of its own, far beyond his own control. He enjoyed the effect of the transformation of white paint over time, particularly as it aided his representation of the smoky skies in and around Manchester. Michael Leber and Judith Sandling comment on Lowry’s discovery of this evolution of the white pigment: ‘He used pure flake white to produce the base of his paintings and found, in an experiment he undertook with the assistance of his father, that over a period the “dead white … had turned a beautifully creamy grey-white”’ (M. Leber and J. Sandling, L.S. Lowry, Oxford, 1987, p. 28).