L.S. Lowry: a fresh look at the complex works of a self-described ‘simple man’

The wardrobe of the British artist L.S. Lowry consisted of little more than two dark grey suits. He used to wear one to paint in, and the other to go out in. As for his ties, they were almost always black — it ‘saves choosing between colours’, he said.

Such sartorial preferences match the enduring popular perception of Lowry as ‘a simple man’ (to use the artist’s own description of himself). He didn’t drink alcohol, never owned a car, and travelled no further than Ireland. As an artist, he spent decades painting industrial landscapes in his home region, the north-west of England.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Lowry’s death — in 1976, aged 88 — and the organisers of a new exhibition at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, about 50 miles north of London, are looking to broaden our appreciation of him.

‘As both an artist and a person, there was more to Lowry than many people think,’ says Fay Blanchard, MK Gallery’s head of exhibitions. ‘For one thing, even though they’re among the best-known images in 20th-century British art, he painted more than just industrial scenes.’

L.S. Lowry: The Theatre of Life features 140 works made across Lowry’s career, from early still lifes executed in academic fashion to late seascapes that border on abstraction.

Also on show are examples from his mysterious series of portraits from the 1950s, featuring a never-identified woman known as Ann. With her large eyes, long dark hair, pale skin and full red lips, as well as her stone-cold expression, she calls to mind the kind of female figure painted by the Pre-Raphaelites. A lifelong bachelor, Lowry gave consistently inconsistent accounts as to who Ann was, including that she was a tennis player who had caught a cold while attending the funeral of one of his parents and died shortly afterwards.

No serious survey of Lowry’s career, of course, could exclude his industrial pictures, and the new exhibition features plenty — typically depicting workers heading en masse to or from a day’s shift at a factory or mill.

Lowry was never a full-time artist. From his early twenties until retiring in his mid-sixties, he had a day job as a rent collector. This took him all over the city of Manchester on foot, allowing him to witness scenes on the streets by day that inspired aspects of the pictures he painted at home by night.

Lowry didn’t produce precise topographical representations, preferring instead composite townscapes — which is to say, scenes that were reliant upon a mixture of memory, imagination, artistic instinct and sketches made on his rounds.

The settings are hardly blissful, and the success of these works, Blanchard says, is partly due to the ‘compassion with which Lowry painted his figures’. Another factor is the white ground he adopted from relatively early in his career — following the advice of his tutor at Salford School of Art, Bernard D. Taylor (who also served as the Manchester Guardian’s art critic). The exhibition includes a few urban scenes from the 1910s and early 1920s which Taylor found too dark, prompting him to recommend to Lowry a way of making his figures stand out.

‘Another myth we’re keen to bust is that he was a self-taught or outsider artist,’ says Blanchard. ‘This gained credence because Lowry operated far from the centre of the British art world in London. The truth is, though, that he spent many years studying at college.’

Lowry took evening classes between 1905 and 1925 at both the Manchester Municipal School of Art and Salford School of Art. Among his tutors at the former was Pierre Adolphe Valette, an Impressionist from France who had settled in the north-west of England. The last big Lowry exhibition — held at Tate Britain in 2013 — explored the artist’s debt, via Valette, to late-19th-century French painting, specifically the way he sourced subject matter in the emerging modern city. ‘I just cannot over-estimate [Valette’s] effect on me,’ Lowry said.

Teeming with life, his townscapes also bear comparison with the crowd paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Like the 16th-century master, Lowry commonly took an elevated and distanced viewpoint, giving his figures a diminutive look.

Writing in the catalogue for a touring exhibition of Lowry’s work organised by the Arts Council in 1966, the critic Edwin Mullins described him as an ‘English isolated eccentric’. Articulating a widely held belief, Mullins considered Lowry to be part of a school of one, an artist — like William Blake or Stanley Spencer — disconnected from any wider network or group.

For the curatorial team at MK Gallery, such a belief is the product of letting knowledge of Lowry’s personal life colour the interpretation of his art.

An only child, Laurence Stephen Lowry was born into a lower-middle-class family in Stretford, on the outskirts of Manchester, in 1887. It’s said that his father (a clerk at an estate agency) and his mother (a piano teacher) had really wanted a daughter. Lowry described the former as a ‘cold fish’ and the latter as ‘very exacting’. However, he lived with them both until they died, in 1932 and 1939 respectively.

In her final years, his mother was bed-bound, and Lowry served as her sole carer, counting among his tasks reading Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray novels to her at night before she fell sleep. He is not known to have had a single romantic relationship.

In the 19th century, Manchester acquired the nickname ‘Cottonopolis’, reflecting its status as the cotton-manufacturing capital of the world. By 1900, it was one of the 10 most populous cities on Earth, with well over a million inhabitants. Finding artistic inspiration in this, Lowry said that his ‘ambition was to put the industrial scene on the map because nobody [before] had done it seriously’.

Recognition came his way late, however. Lowry was in his fifties when he received his first solo exhibition — at Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery in London in 1939. The director of the Tate Gallery, John Rothenstein, said he was ‘simply riveted’ by what he saw, and the institution duly acquired the 1927 painting Dwellings, Ordsall Lane, Salford for its collection.

Perhaps out of a sense of liberation at the end of the Second World War — and certainly thanks to growing amounts of free time as he wound down his commitments as a rent collector — Lowry increasingly travelled outside Manchester from the mid-1940s onwards.

He continued to paint crowds, but they now tended to be depicted in moments of leisure — at fairgrounds, in parks, on beaches and at festivals.

‘These people are having fun and enjoying themselves,’ says Blanchard. ‘But what persists across Lowry’s career is his fascination with human behaviour and social interaction. He was a great observer of gesture. What often gets lost when you see Lowry’s work in reproduction — and what we’re confident visitors will appreciate in person — is his attention to detail. His works reward close looking.’

A picture worth seeking out in this regard is Sunday Afternoon, which captures the activity of hundreds of people in a park — from orators on soapboxes to a baby throwing a tantrum in a pram because of a lost ball.

In the post-war years, honours and fame came fast. In 1953, Lowry was one of a handful of artists officially commissioned to paint Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation (alas, the resulting picture isn’t on show in Milton Keynes). In 1957, to mark his 70th birthday, Lowry was the subject of a BBC documentary watched by more than two million people.

The following decade, he was elected a Royal Academician, and had his painting Coming Out of School (depicting the afternoon exodus from an inner-city school) reproduced on postage stamps across the UK. He was even offered a knighthood, which he turned down on grounds that he was ‘against social distinction of any kind’.

According to Blanchard, Lowry’s late-career successes owed much to ‘nostalgia and a changing Britain’. Wartime bomb damage, along with deindustrialisation in the second half of the 20th century, saw the clearance of myriad house and factories across urban areas. City skylines were newly filled with high-rise flats.

As the historian Chris Waters writes in the exhibition catalogue, ‘it was not only buildings that were destroyed, but the very fabric of the traditional working-class community. A wholly new urban landscape arose that disrupted traditional patterns of social life, while the factories and communities that had once sustained that life were becoming a mere memory. It was a memory that was now cherished.’

In such a context, Lowry’s industrial scenes grew ever more popular — even though by the late 1940s, as already noted, he had moved on artistically. (‘The blighters keep asking for more,’ he complained.)

Lowry was praised for having conveyed the beauty in industrial England, portraying it as an urban pastoral. In 1951, the Sunday Times art critic, Eric Newton, claimed that his imagery was set ‘somewhere between Limbo and Paradise’.

Fast-forward to today, and not only has the world that Lowry painted vanished, but so too have most of those who lived in it and later mourned its loss. The artist is now part of the British cultural canon, his townscapes enjoying an equivalent place in the national historical imagination to the landscapes of Constable. Not bad for a self-declared simple man.

L.S. Lowry: The Theatre of Life is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, until 28 February 2027

Related artists: L.S. Lowry