Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A.

Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd, London (as Going to School)
Fred Uhlman
Sale, Christie's London, 9th November 1984, lot 194, where acquired by the late owner

London, Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd, New English Art (details untraced);
London, Royal Academy of Arts, L.S. Lowry, 4th September - 14th November 1976, cat. no.189.

M.W. Lees, Bennett Street Sunday School, Stellar Books LLP, Cheshire, 2013, illustrated on the cover.

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar or Hamish Dewar Ltd., 13 & 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James's, London, SW1Y 6BU. Structural Condition: The canvas is unlined on what would appear to be the original keyed wooden stretcher. There is a canvas stamp on the reverse. There are very faint stretcher bar lines corresponding to the upper and lower horizontal stretcher bars. These are entirely stable and not visually distracting and it should be stressed that these are very slight. Paint Surface: Inspection under ultra-violet light confirms how discoloured the varnish layers have become and shows just a few tiny spots of inpainting on the dark wall at the end of a terrace of houses on the left of the composition. These are approximately 15 cm from the left vertical framing edge and are really no more than small specks. There are some very small losses on the outer turnover edges which would be covered by the framing sight edge. Summary: The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition and should respond well to cleaning and revarnishing. Housed behind glass in an ornate gilt and plaster frame. Unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

St Paul’s School, Bennett Street was, in its heyday, an institution central to the lives of many of the residents of Manchester’s inner city area of New Cross, and it was here that the artist’s parents met in the second half of the nineteenth-century. Lowry’s mother, Elizabeth, studied at the school and later went on to teach classes in music, enforcing the strong religious and moral framework that was to hold such a bearing over her son’s later life. Founded in 1801 by the social reformer David Stott and established on the site since 1818 the school owed its existence to the Sunday School Movement which took hold in England in the late eighteenth-century, setting about one of the most important phases of social reform for the middle and working classes. Bennett Street (as it was commonly known) imparted a strong religious outlook onto the lives of those living nearby and although no records exist of Lowry’s regular attendance as a pupil (unlike the majority of his cousins living nearby), the young artist certainly accompanied his mother in her teaching there, first attending at the age of seven when instead of joining the boys’ class, he remained with his mother who was then an organist in the No.4 Adult Ladies’ Room, a fact ascribed to his crippling shyness. As the Reverend Albert Willcock, grandson of Mr Handofth, Churchwarden at St Clement’s Church Longsight, Manchester, later recalled: 'He would stand by the organ, silently watching the ladies singing hymns … (and) if anyone spoke to him he would hide behind her skirt' (quoted in Shelley Rohde, L.S. Lowry, A Biography, Lowry Press, Salford, 1979, p.45). This faithful dedication that he displayed towards his mother continued until her death in 1939, an event that had a devastating and lasting impact over the artist’s later life. 

Of all the works included within the A.J. Thompson Collection, St Paul’s School, Bennett Street holds a position as, certainly in a biographical sense, amongst the most important to the artist. By 1950, the year that Lowry painted its large, imposing nineteenth-century façade, the Sunday School building was in a state of disrepair following the Second World War and decades of general and social neglect.  Yet in his rendering of the large red-bricked exterior Lowry captures the Bennett Street of his childhood, a subject he first sketched in 1949 and worked up the following year into this impressive oil. The school was also to hold a significant position within the artist’s later life, whether in his contribution to their annual magazine or acting as an important benefactor, attending fairs and fetes as late as 1955. 

In the present scene, Lowry takes an accurate rendering of the architecture before him, in contrast to the majority of his composite landscapes of the period, which drew together different architectural highlights into one imagined landscape. The present work is a rare insight into Lowry’s biographical take on his immediate surroundings, capturing the building as a social hub to which the figures in the foreground appear to flock, a factor which obviously appealed to the work’s first owner, the artist Fred Uhlman, an important early patron of Lowry’s work and co-exhibitor at Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd, in the late 1940s. St Paul’s School, Bennett Street captures the very domestic, everyday life that the artist would have grown up amongst, and stands as an important social document within the development of the lives of the working class occupants of Manchester, a world now lost, but one which to Lowry remained a fond and important lasting memory.