Mill Gates

Lowry’s mill scenes are dominated by the factory buildings and structures that he knew from his youth, when he made a daily journey to work each day, and experienced the hustle and bustle, the ebb and flow of a smoky, heavily populated metropolis. There is a timelessness to Lowry’s view of the city, even as it changed in the face of the post-war years of regeneration and renewal; Lowry was able to remove the new structures from his vision and continued to find buildings in his art that no longer existed anywhere other than in his own imagination.

In the present work, Lowry’s cast of characters are varied in execution. In the foreground are the large-scale figures - distinctive individuals walking their dogs or pushing their prams, some carrying bags, and walking with purpose. In the middle distance, the workers are gradually reduced in size as they become fleeting impressions of walking figures, eventually represented by gentle smudges of the pencil as they arrive at the mill which seems to swallow them up and absorb them completely.

Unlike many artists, Lowry’s drawings typically function as stand-alone creations, and he employed very similar working methods and stylistic effects in both painting and drawing. Mervyn Levy has noted that Lowry’s drawings 'are seldom planned as a preparation for painting, and ... have always run distinct, if parallel, courses' (M. Levy, The Drawings of L.S. Lowry, Public and Private, Cory, Adams and Mackay, London, 1963, p. 7).