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拍品专文
In the early 1960s, newly elected to the Royal Academy, L.S. Lowry turned his attention to South Wales, where his friend and patron Monty Bloom, who had grown up in the Rhondda, encouraged him to paint the valleys. Procession in South Wales, Whit Monday is a striking product of this period: a portrait of a community in procession, rendered with quiet, concentrated intensity.
A long line of walkers, with a group of children at its head, moves steadily across a pale, almost empty ground. Whit Monday was the day on which chapel congregations across Wales took to the streets, yet Lowry gives us nothing of the setting: no chapel, no street, no hillside. Stripped of context, a day of shared celebration acquires an unexpected solitude. ‘[T]here’s nothing very lonely about a beach on August Bank Holiday’, Lowry told an interviewer in 1966, ‘yet my people seem to do that themselves in my pictures’ (Lowry, interviewed by B. Sturt-Penrose, The Arts Review, no. 22, November 1966).
The white ground had long been central to Lowry’s art. Told by his tutor – the critic Bernard Taylor – that his figures were lost against a dark ground, Lowry responded by painting them on white, and the figures leapt forward. The colour continued to fascinate him: in 1924 he coated a small board with six layers of flake white and sealed it away for six or seven years, discovering that it had mellowed to a ‘creamy grey-white’, as soft and faintly smoke-tinged as the air of the industrial communities he painted (Lowry, quoted in M. Howard, Lowry: A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, pp. 109-10). Here the ground is not simply a backdrop but a void: each figure stands alone against it, even as the whole line moves forward together.
The present work was acquired from the Lefevre Gallery by Vernon Sangster, founder of the football pools firm Vernons and a collector of Lowry’s work. It passed by descent to his son Robert, chairman of the family firm and a leading racehorse owner, whose horses won two Derbys. At once a gathering and a study in isolation, Procession in South Wales, Whit Monday is Lowry at his most quintessential.
A long line of walkers, with a group of children at its head, moves steadily across a pale, almost empty ground. Whit Monday was the day on which chapel congregations across Wales took to the streets, yet Lowry gives us nothing of the setting: no chapel, no street, no hillside. Stripped of context, a day of shared celebration acquires an unexpected solitude. ‘[T]here’s nothing very lonely about a beach on August Bank Holiday’, Lowry told an interviewer in 1966, ‘yet my people seem to do that themselves in my pictures’ (Lowry, interviewed by B. Sturt-Penrose, The Arts Review, no. 22, November 1966).
The white ground had long been central to Lowry’s art. Told by his tutor – the critic Bernard Taylor – that his figures were lost against a dark ground, Lowry responded by painting them on white, and the figures leapt forward. The colour continued to fascinate him: in 1924 he coated a small board with six layers of flake white and sealed it away for six or seven years, discovering that it had mellowed to a ‘creamy grey-white’, as soft and faintly smoke-tinged as the air of the industrial communities he painted (Lowry, quoted in M. Howard, Lowry: A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, pp. 109-10). Here the ground is not simply a backdrop but a void: each figure stands alone against it, even as the whole line moves forward together.
The present work was acquired from the Lefevre Gallery by Vernon Sangster, founder of the football pools firm Vernons and a collector of Lowry’s work. It passed by descent to his son Robert, chairman of the family firm and a leading racehorse owner, whose horses won two Derbys. At once a gathering and a study in isolation, Procession in South Wales, Whit Monday is Lowry at his most quintessential.