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Laurence Stephen Lowry,RA
1887-1976
The Family
Signed limited edition print on wove paper from the edition of850
Image size: 10.5 x 8.5 in.
Stamped by the Fine Art Trade Guild
Literature:
Henry Donn, The Illustrated Limited Edition Prints of L.S. Lowry, Scolar Press, 1979
Lowry is synonymous with images of the working class of the Industrial North but he was
not of those streets by birth, his family were of the ‘respectable’ Victorian lower-middle class
for whom the threat of declining gentility was a real fear at the beginning of the century. Yet
as the family’s fortunes altered, forcing them to move in 1909 to, the then, down-at-heel
Manchester district of Pendlebury, the young Lowry found himself immersed in the lives of
real working class families. Shortly after the move to Pendlebury Lowry joined the Pall Mall
Property company as a rent collector and clerk in (he would work there until his retirement, a
fact which did not become widely known until after his death) and whilst walking his rounds
he gained an intimate knowledge of the people and families he encountered and remained
fascinated by their plight all his life. “All those people in my pictures, they are all alone. They
have got all their private sorrows, their own absorption. But they can’t contact one another.
We are all of us alone - cut off. All my people are lonely. Crowds are the most lonely thing of
all. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. You have only got to look at them to see that’ (L.S.
Lowry, quoted in Julian Spalding, Lowry, London, 1987, p.51). Although Lowry’s interest
in the figure is evident throughout his career it was not until the late 1950s and 60s that he
began to abandon his signature crowd scenes in favour of small groups of people and families
, rendered with a more highly developed sense of individual identity. Indeed, during this time
Lowry’s figures become of such central importance that he begins to place them not against
an urban backdrop, but simply against a white void so that the subject of the painting becomes
the figures alone, or, crucially, the nebulous atmosphere inhabiting the spaces between them.