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Lot Essay
Lowry painted Good Friday, Daisy Nook, in 1946 and the densely populated canvas is testament to Lowry's skill as a painter. The large-scale canvas, packed with a multitude of figures, depicts the Lancashire fair held annually at Daisy Nook. At the time that Lowry painted the scene there were only two statutory holidays for mill workers, Christmas Day and Good Friday. The Easter fair at Daisy Nook, situated between Droylsden and Failsworth, near Manchester, is still held annually and run by the Silcock family, whose name appears in the painting. It provided a huge variety of entertainment for the crowds that congregated there.
The name 'Daisy Nook' was coined from a book written by Benjamin Brierly in 1855. He had asked his friend, Charles Potter, an Oldham artist, to draw an imaginary place called Daisy Nook. Potter's drawing was based on the village of Waterhouses and this rural spot on the River Medlock and from then on the area was known as Daisy Nook.
Although there is an industrial chimney, just visible on the horizon, the overall mood of the painting is one of holiday and post-war optimism: a multitude of colourful figures throng the painting, children are clutching newly-bought whirligigs and flags and groups of people crowd round the striped fairground tents and queue for the rides on offer, including the 'Silcock Bros Thriller', visible in the work.
Although there are a group of works that Lowry painted in the 1940s and early 1950s, depicting beach scenes (see lot 115) and bank holidays, he claimed that he, 'only deal[t] with poverty. Always with gloom. You'll never see a joyous picture of mine. I never do a jolly picture. You never see the sun in my work. That's because I can't paint shadow'.
Michael Howard points out that Lowry's figures never seem to escape the industrialisation that surrounds them in their working lives: 'Lowry's reduction of his living figures to the role of automata suggests a lot about his own private impulses; at the same time his puppets offer a well-worn but effective metaphor for the de-humanising effects of the industrial process. His doll-like forms, his stage-like settings, the very artifice of his artistic practice and his calculated distance as the maker of these images are the very reasons surely that Lowry's canvases are so powerful and evocative of the factory worker's lot. Even outside their working hours, Lowry seems to say, on their way to or from the mill, they cannot escape the industrial system which during their working hours controls their bodies and restricts their freedom of mind. Like a latter-day Doctor Caligari, he deploys their bodies and gives them only a limited range of expressive gestures, as though working in the mill has imposed restricted movement on them, reducing their ability to express themselves except by the most minimal of means' (see M. Howard, Lowry: A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, pp. 135-6).
Lowry painted a small group of works and executed a number of drawings depicting the Easter fair at Daisy Nook, including one currently in the Government Art Collection (fig.1). The present work is the major version and was chosen to be included in the 1978 Royal Academy exhibition. In the Daisy Nook paintings some groupings of figures and individuals recur. In all of them there is a sense of the ebb and flow of people that Lowry was very conscious of in his depictions of factory workers and industrial street scenes. The viewer's eye follows the movement inherent in this mass gathering of people, at times stopping on a single figure or small group, as if Lowry had punctuated the painting like sentences in a paragraph.
The composition of the work is typical: 'As with his industrial paintings, the crowd fills the foreground and the activities, both planned and unplanned, seem infinite. Everywhere one looks, something is going on. The tents and caravans form a thin line between foreground and background and act as a boundary to the scene. There are few rural scenes which Lowry could depict as he did his industrial ones, other than the great fairs. In this case, there is no doubt that Lowry was accurate in his rendition, particularly of that lonely chimney and building standing on the hill. When out bicycling near Daisy Nook, an aquaintance of Mr Lowry saw the artist and asked him what he was doing. Lowry had explained that 'he was doing a painting and had forgotten the outline of the background. He took out of his pocket an envelope on the back of which he had drawn the pump house and tall chimney'' (see J. Sandling and M. Leber, Lowry's City: A Painter and his Locale, Salford, 2000, p. 89) (see fig. 3).
The name 'Daisy Nook' was coined from a book written by Benjamin Brierly in 1855. He had asked his friend, Charles Potter, an Oldham artist, to draw an imaginary place called Daisy Nook. Potter's drawing was based on the village of Waterhouses and this rural spot on the River Medlock and from then on the area was known as Daisy Nook.
Although there is an industrial chimney, just visible on the horizon, the overall mood of the painting is one of holiday and post-war optimism: a multitude of colourful figures throng the painting, children are clutching newly-bought whirligigs and flags and groups of people crowd round the striped fairground tents and queue for the rides on offer, including the 'Silcock Bros Thriller', visible in the work.
Although there are a group of works that Lowry painted in the 1940s and early 1950s, depicting beach scenes (see lot 115) and bank holidays, he claimed that he, 'only deal[t] with poverty. Always with gloom. You'll never see a joyous picture of mine. I never do a jolly picture. You never see the sun in my work. That's because I can't paint shadow'.
Michael Howard points out that Lowry's figures never seem to escape the industrialisation that surrounds them in their working lives: 'Lowry's reduction of his living figures to the role of automata suggests a lot about his own private impulses; at the same time his puppets offer a well-worn but effective metaphor for the de-humanising effects of the industrial process. His doll-like forms, his stage-like settings, the very artifice of his artistic practice and his calculated distance as the maker of these images are the very reasons surely that Lowry's canvases are so powerful and evocative of the factory worker's lot. Even outside their working hours, Lowry seems to say, on their way to or from the mill, they cannot escape the industrial system which during their working hours controls their bodies and restricts their freedom of mind. Like a latter-day Doctor Caligari, he deploys their bodies and gives them only a limited range of expressive gestures, as though working in the mill has imposed restricted movement on them, reducing their ability to express themselves except by the most minimal of means' (see M. Howard, Lowry: A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, pp. 135-6).
Lowry painted a small group of works and executed a number of drawings depicting the Easter fair at Daisy Nook, including one currently in the Government Art Collection (fig.1). The present work is the major version and was chosen to be included in the 1978 Royal Academy exhibition. In the Daisy Nook paintings some groupings of figures and individuals recur. In all of them there is a sense of the ebb and flow of people that Lowry was very conscious of in his depictions of factory workers and industrial street scenes. The viewer's eye follows the movement inherent in this mass gathering of people, at times stopping on a single figure or small group, as if Lowry had punctuated the painting like sentences in a paragraph.
The composition of the work is typical: 'As with his industrial paintings, the crowd fills the foreground and the activities, both planned and unplanned, seem infinite. Everywhere one looks, something is going on. The tents and caravans form a thin line between foreground and background and act as a boundary to the scene. There are few rural scenes which Lowry could depict as he did his industrial ones, other than the great fairs. In this case, there is no doubt that Lowry was accurate in his rendition, particularly of that lonely chimney and building standing on the hill. When out bicycling near Daisy Nook, an aquaintance of Mr Lowry saw the artist and asked him what he was doing. Lowry had explained that 'he was doing a painting and had forgotten the outline of the background. He took out of his pocket an envelope on the back of which he had drawn the pump house and tall chimney'' (see J. Sandling and M. Leber, Lowry's City: A Painter and his Locale, Salford, 2000, p. 89) (see fig. 3).