Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A.

Collection of the Artist in 1951
Alex Reid & Lefevre, London, where acquired by the previous owner's family in 1953
Their sale, Christie's London, 28th November 2001, lot 30
Richard Green, London, where acquired by the present owner in 2002

Bradford, Cartwright Hall Art Gallery (on loan).

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar, Fine Art Conservation, 13 & 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James, London, SW1Y 6BU: UNCONDITIONAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE Structural Condition The canvas is unlined and is securely attached to its original keyed wooden stretcher. This is providing a stable structural support. The canvas is inscribed on the reverse and a perspex backboard is attached to the stretcher. The canvas is fairly slack and requires retensioning. Paint surface The paint surface has a relatively even varnish layer. There are two very minor paint losses either side of the hat worn by the man standing below the street sign and wearing a red scarf. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows scattered retouchings, the most significant of which are: 1) in and around the group of figures in the lower right of the composition, above the fencing, 2) within the figures of the young children in the lower left corner, 3) other spots and lines to the clothing of the standing figure in the centre of the composition, 4) very fine carefully applied lines of retouching within the facade of the house to the left of the street lamp, and 5) scattered lines within the dark brown building emerging from the left side of the composition. There are other small scattered retouchings. Summary The painting therefore appears to be in good and stable condition and would benefit from retensioning, and the filling and retouching of the two paint losses. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any questions about the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Forged in the years of the Depression, Lowry's imagery manages to capture something that is attempted by few of his contemporaries- the lives of the urban poor. Whilst the Victorian artists such as Luke Fildes had painted the poor, there is often a moralizing sub-text. Camden Town's treatment of the bed-sitting world of London's shabby terraces approached the subject more objectively, but their poor are mostly the junior clerks and shop-girls straining to make ends meet whilst maintaining a whisper of gentility. Only with Lowry do we see an artist developing, indeed pioneering, what would become a genre. However, very few of those who followed Lowry into the sooty mills and tenements of Britain's industrial cities managed to achieve the same level of empathy with the poor and dispossessed and thus keep their paintings free of painfully hackneyed nostalgia.

People Talking is a masterful example of Lowry's ability to make the ordinary fascinating. As we emerge from an alley between two houses, we come upon a gathering in a street. There is no obvious reason for such a gathering, no event to gossip over or sight to see. It has one point only, to pass the time. Throughout the 1920s, the position of the workers in factories across the country became increasingly parlous, with apprentices laid off once their time was served, growing mechanisation reducing job numbers and lessening skills, and wage levels increasingly unable to cope with the demands of making a living. Lowry's world is the world of the General Strike, the Jarrow Marchers. Walter Greenwood's 1933 novel, Love on the Dole draws out the lives lived in such times, the meagre lodgings, the pawn shop, the short time work. Seeing such lives every day as part of his work gave Lowry an insight into a world that he would not normally have had, and he repaid this opportunity with paintings that offer us a genuinely sympathetic and largely non-judgemental view. In People Talking, children play in the street, the old gossip and the out of work wait. There is no attempt to moralise, no attempt to dramatise, perhaps even no attempt to sympathise, merely a presentation of a scene that tells us a great deal but leaves us to make our own impressions. Everywhere around us, there are signs of hard times, the clothes of the figures, the lodging houses, even the weathered and flaking paint of the wooden fence in the foreground.

As such they are curiously accurate. Even now, in the world after the Clean Air Act of 1956 and modern emissions legislation it is possible to find the occasional bit of soot-blackened brick or stone wall that hasn't been spruced up and still retains its industrial-era patina. We can still turn a corner and see the odd old workshop or mill, perhaps still used in some way or maybe awaiting its fate, and we see a glimpse of the world Lowry painted for us. Photographs of the period show us streets filled with shawled figures, the black and white world under the pall of greyish smog that hangs over all. Lowry's paintings in his early career, during the 1920s and 1930s, often exhibit just this kind of view. Later he would tease out the oddity of some of the folk he saw, not mocking but simply showing, and of course by the time he became properly famous the urge to paint the industrial world was leaving him as he moved more and more towards painting people rather than places. Yet the lessons in the humanity, humility and routine of ordinary lives he learnt in the early years in Salford and Manchester stayed with him all his life.