L.S.Lowry - the painter who chronicled industrial Lancashire
Laurence Stephen Lowry was an English artist of the mid-twentieth century whose drawings and paintings depict Pendlebury, Lancashire. Here he lived and worked for more than 40 years, painting workers heading to the factories and mills.
Lowry developed a distinctive style of painting and is best known for his urban landscapes peopled with human figures, often referred to as "matchstick men". He painted mysterious unpopulated landscapes, brooding portraits and the unpublished "marionette" works, which were only found after his death.
His use of stylised figures, which cast no shadows, and lack of weather effects in many of his landscapes led critics to label him a naïve "Sunday painter".
Lowry was born in 1887 in Stretford, which was then in Lancashire. The difficult birth compromised the health of his mother, who was unable to continue teaching the piano. There were no other children, and, over time, the family fell into debt and were forced to move from their home in leafy suburbia to industrial Pendlebury.
Lowry initially disliked the area, as his mother did, but soon found it an inspiration for his work - particularly as it was a subject-matter that few other artists were recording.
Lowry worked full time as a rent-collector, only retiring at 65. All his works until then were created in his spare time, late at night from memory. He began to get recognition as an artist aged 52, when sixty of his works sold in an exhibition and one of them was bought by the Tate.
Lowry never married and died in 1976. The Lowry art gallery in Salford Quays was opened in 2000 at a cost of £106 million. It houses 55 of his paintings and 278 drawings – the world's largest collection of his work – with up to 100 on display. In January 2005, a statue of him was unveiled in Mottram in Longdendale near his home from 1948 until his death in 1976.
Further reading
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