LS LOWRY And His Love for the Fylde

LS LOWRY

And His Love for the Fylde

By Margaret Brecknell

LS Lowry Statue at Mottram. Photo Credit: A Carty/CC BY-SA 3.0

Artist, LS Lowry, is famous for his urban landscapes, which depict life in the industrial heartlands of North-West England during the first half of the 20th century.

Yet, he also produced some fine seascape and rural landscape paintings, many of which were inspired by the area around the Fylde coast which he visited throughout his life.

Laurence Stephen Lowry was born on 1st November 1887 and spent much of his childhood in the leafy Manchester suburb of Victoria Park. The artist was an only child and his early years do not appear to have been particularly happy. His mother, Elizabeth, had harboured ambitions of becoming a concert pianist, but ill health prevented her from doing so and she appears to have become an increasingly embittered woman, who took out her disappointment in life on her husband, Robert, and son. As a result, the young Lowry is said to have been a shy and reserved child, who struggled to make friends at school. A fictionalised version of Lowry’s difficult relationship with his mother, which continued well into adulthood, was portrayed in the 2019 film, Mrs Lowry & Son.

However, Lowry’s early years were not entirely bleak. The artist’s enduring affection for the Fylde coast stemmed from his childhood when he enjoyed family holidays in Lytham with his parents. He also appears to have had an interest in drawing from

landscape, in which he now lived and worked, provided him with an unlikely source of inspiration for his artistic endeavours. He would later remember the moment when, after missing a train at Pendlebury Station, he was struck by the unexpected beauty of his industrial surroundings. “I saw the Acme Company’s spinning mill. The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out hundreds of little pinched figures, heads down“, he wrote, adding that “I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture”.

Lowry’s former home in Pendlebury. Photo Credit: Richerman/CC BY-SA 4.0

an early age, encouraged by an uncle who had himself once attended the Royal Academy. Lowry is said to have enjoyed drawing the yachts bobbing on the sea off the coast of Lytham whilst holidaying there as a child.

In 1905, Lowry began to attend evening art classes at the Manchester Municipal School of Art. His tutor was an accomplished French Impressionist painter named Adolphe Valette. Lowry would later recall that, “I cannot over-estimate the effect on me…of Adolphe Valette”.

As a result of the family’s worsening financial situation, his parents moved, in May 1909, to the more industrialised surroundings of Pendlebury, a suburb of Salford. Lowry went with them and, now in his early twenties, began work as a rent collector for the Pall Mall Property Company, a position which he would hold for the remainder of his working life.

For Elizabeth Lowry, the move to Pendlebury only added to her disenchantment with life, but for Lowry himself the industrial

As he went about his daily job as a debt collector, he began to draw the street scenes which he encountered along the way and would spend his evenings turning these rough sketches into oil paintings, sometimes working into the early hours. He appears to have had an almost obsessive desire to commit these scenes to paper, later revealing he was inspired by the realisation that this type of subject matter had rarely appeared in the work of artists previously.

Gradually Lowry began to develop the unique style, for which he would later become famous. In his midtwenties, he started to attend evening classes at the Salford School of Art. One of his tutors was Bernard Taylor, the then art critic for the Manchester Guardian. He appears to have recognised Lowry’s potential early on and one day offered him some constructive criticism, suggesting to the budding artist that a dark background did not complement the subdued colour palette which he favoured. From then on, Lowry began to use a pure white background which showcased the fine details in his work

to great effect. Famously, the artist only ever used a palette of five colours – flake white, ivory black, vermilion, yellow ochre and Prussian blue.

From an early stage, Lowry’s urban landscapes were populated by the iconic “matchstick” figures of men, women, children and even animals, with whom he is now so closely associated. His industrial scenes are full of these figures, who often appear to be leaning forward with their heads down, as if they are battling the elements or rushing to reach their destination.

In 1932, Lowry’s father died of pneumonia and the artist was left to care for his mother, Elizabeth, who was by this stage virtually bedridden. With his additional responsibilities, Lowry’s artistic output inevitably slowed down during the 1930s, but towards the end of the decade he enjoyed his first success in London when the Lefevre Gallery in Mayfair hosted the first one-man exhibition of his work in the capital. Elizabeth Lowry passed away only a few months later in October 1939.

During the height of the Manchester Blitz in World War II, Lowry volunteered to serve two or three nights a week as a firewatcher on the roof of the city centre’s large Lewis’s department store. This gave him a unique view of the city which he so loved to paint. He was also commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to portray the contribution of North-West England’s workers to the war effort. His 1943 painting, Going To Work, which depicts workers arriving at the Mather & Platt engineering works, is now on display at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester.

Lowry’s contribution as a war artist served to raise his national profile and by 1948 he was earning enough from his art to purchase “The Elms”, the home in the village of Mottram where he remained for the rest of his life. Now retired after forty years as a rent collector, Lowry was, in 1953, one of several artists commissioned by the Ministry of Works to produce a painting to commemorate the Queen’s Coronation. On the big day, Lowry took a position high up in one of the temporary stands and sketched the scene as the gold state coach passed the huge crowds which had assembled outside Buckingham Palace. His oil painting, Procession Passing the Queen Victoria Memorial, is typically detailed and captures the excitement of the people who witnessed events that day.

With more leisure time at his disposal, Lowry would regularly visit the Fylde coast during the 1950s. Local people still fondly

remember seeing the artist, as he walked along the seafront, making quick sketches on the first piece of paper that came to hand, whether that was hotel notepaper, the back of an envelope or even toilet roll. Lowry was particularly fascinated by the view across the estuary close to the jetty where visitors waited to catch the ferry from Knott End to Fleetwood. The location inspired one of his most famous paintings from this period, the 1957 artwork entitled The Jetty At Knott End, near Fleetwood.

As well as his paintings of the seafront at Knott End, Lowry’s time on the Fylde also inspired him to create an entirely different kind of painting. From his earliest days as an artist, he had been inspired by the sea and during this period he began to produce some fine seascapes. In contrast to most of his other artwork, these paintings were entirely devoid

Lowry also ventured inland during his time on the Fylde and produced some interesting rural landscapes, often depicting the farms which he encountered as he wandered round the countryside. Unlike many of the great landscape painters who preceded him, Lowry, typically, does not seek to portray the countryside in an idealised fashion, but, instead, opts for a more realistic representation of the landscapes which he discovered there.

By the time of Lowry’s death, aged 88, in February 1976, he had become a “national treasure”, whose paintings were loved by the general public, even though his work continued to divide opinion amongst the art elite. He had been offered a knighthood in the 1968 New Year’s Honours List, but turned it down. The modest and very private Lowry feared the honour might change his lifestyle for the worse.

Since his passing, more recognition has come his way, most notably in the North-West at Salford Quays where the Lowry Centre was opened in 2000. The gallery space houses a permanent exhibition of Lowry’s work from all periods of his career.

Lowry’s connection with the Fylde has also not been forgotten. In 2015, a statue commemorating the artist’s visits to Knott End was unveiled at the seafront, close to the spot where the artist enjoyed sketching the crowds who were waiting for the Knott End to Fleetwood ferry. It seems entirely appropriate that the 5ft stainless-steel statue features one of the artist’s iconic “matchstick” men, together with a “matchstick” dog.