Going to the Match is an early masterpiece by L.S. Lowry, making its first public appearance in over fifty years. Painted in 1928, it occupies a critical place within Lowry’s oeuvre and its re-emergence sheds light on our understanding of Lowry’s artistic development in the 1920s and 30s, prior to his solo ‘discovery' exhibitions with Lefevre Gallery in London in 1939 and 45 onwards. As the critic Mervyn Levy wrote of Lowry, ‘his basic imagery is rooted in the Twenties’.

Not only is Going to the Match the earliest known depiction of one of Lowry’s most iconic subjects – that of spectators thronging to or from a sporting occasion – but alongside Going to the Mill, 1925 (private collection), it is one of the earliest illustrations of Lowry’s interest in the movement of people on mass in one direction as a crowd, to and from a place of recreation or a place of work. Technically, it reveals the key influence of Lowry’s art teacher in Manchester, the French Impressionist Adolphe Valette, and demonstrates his innovative use of working on white ground, a method which by 1928 he had recently mastered and was to become an essential part of his visual language. Notably, it is rugby that Lowry portrays and specifically, rugby league – a game entrenched in the working-class fabric of northern life and thus integral to Lowry’s artistic outlook. It is one of only two of the sport known to have been painted by Lowry – the other, Coming from the Match, dates to 1959 (sold Christie’s, London, 2 July 2020, lot 10).

1928 was the year Lowry, aged 41, stopped attending art school after a long apprenticeship which began in 1905 with evening classes at the Manchester School of Art and subsequently part-time at Salford School of Art. As the decade drew to a close, Lowry had gained sufficient confidence in his subject – the industrial landscape – and in his technical abilities to successfully translate it to canvas. It also coincided with a modest but increasing public recognition of his artistic output. This growing conviction is evident in his Self-Portrait of 1925 (The Lowry, Salford), painted a few years before the present work (fig. 1). It portrays a simple, cloth-capped Lowry which, like his public character reveals little, but shows an intensity and seriousness in his gaze. Over the following decades was to emerge one of the most significant, powerful and individual bodies of work produced by a British artist in the twentieth century.

Lowry’s long attendance at art school, working around his daily job as a rent collector, demonstrates his steadfast commitment and focus – hallmarks of his career. For Lowry, the experience was essential. Later in life he was to recall: ‘I couldn’t have done those little figures without my academic training. In my own opinion I owe everything to the drawing I used to do at the art school, first the antique drawing and then the life.’ (Lowry quoted in Allen Andrews, The Life of L.S. Lowry, Jupiter Publishing, London, 1977, p. 61.) It also introduced Lowry to the Frenchman Adolphe Valette, his tutor at Manchester School of Art, who had a significant influence on his work (fig. 2)

As T. J. Clark emphasized for Lowry’s exhibition at Tate Britain in 2013: ‘Valette was a serious and accomplished late impressionist. Lowry was immensely fortunate to have as a main point of reference – it is easy to take this for granted – a French art of high ambition that had made Manchester’s atmosphere its subject.’ (Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, London, Tate Publishing, 2013, exh. cat., p. 66). Drawing on the French connection to Lowry’s art, Clark re-positioned Lowry’s significance within the context of Impressionism. Lowry was in part taking up the mantle set by Manet, Pissarro, Degas and van Gogh in their recording of modernity from the 1870s – the parks, boulevards, tramcars and grittier aspects of life on the edges of the city.

By the turn of the twentieth century, however, artists no longer painted modernity because it no longer presented itself as a distinctive territory, ‘the ordinary life of the “modern” had become un-exotic’ (T.J. Clark, op. cit., p. 39). Yet Lowry, living within the small streets of Pendlebury dominated by factories, mills and chimneys, saw an aspect of modernity that needed to be painted and which no other artist working in Britain had seriously engaged with.

Herein lies Lowry’s rarity, who never compromised his vision for popular or commercial success, and it was this integrity which ultimately won him public success later in life. Under Valette’s influence, it was to the style of Impressionism that Lowry turned. Atmosphere was a crucial element of Valette’s paintings, recording Manchester in a way not dissimilar to Monet in London. Atmosphere was also fundamental for Lowry, keenly felt in the monochrome palette and heavy clouds of Going to the Match – a cold, drab day as the crowd make their way past grey factories and a billowing chimney to the match. Unlike the more picturesque elements of Valette and the Impressionists however, Lowry gives a more matter-of-fact rendering; he de-mystifies. It is this approach which marks Lowry’s work so distinctly. The dry, abrasive surfaces - chalky-white and shadowless - are critical to this atmosphere.

Lowry arrived at this technique through the criticism of Bernard Taylor, his teacher at Salford School of Art. In Lowry’s earliest works, an overall muddiness and lack of distinction sullies the paintings (fig. 3). Aware of his shortcomings, Lowry took one or two examples to Taylor to review. ‘This will never do,’ Taylor commented, while holding the pictures up against a dark background, immediately revealing their dingy confusion. Put-out, Lowry went home and did two pictures of dark figures on a white ground. Returning with them to Taylor he immediately approved, ‘that’s right. That’s perfectly right’ (Lowry quoted in Shelley Rohde, LS Lowry, A Life, Haus Publishing, London, 2007, p. 91-2). Through the 1920s, Lowry experimented with flake white with increasing success and by 1928 and Going to the Match, preparing a chalk white ground which would mellow with time, became a staple of his output to follow.

Like Valette’s, Taylor’s support proved critical. In 1921 Lowry held his first exhibition at 7 Mosely Street, Manchester. Although, as Lowry was to recall wryly in later life, he ‘didn’t sell one’, it marked the start of his career. As the art critic for The Manchester Guardian, Taylor reviewed the exhibition and gave Lowry his first public, and perceptive, appreciation:

It was this review, Lowry said, which gave him the ‘confidence to carry on’ (Lowry quoted in Shelley Rohde, op. cit., 1999, p.156). His perseverance was slowly rewarded as the decade progressed. The year before the present work, Lowry’s Coming out of School (1927) was purchased by the Duveen Fund (established by the dealer Lord Duveen) for the Tate. The presentation was a significant endorsement, although the work was not to hang publicly until the 1940s. Yet while England was initially reticent to embrace Lowry, he found a positive reception in Paris.

Over a number of years from 1928, Lowry submitted work to the Paris Salon d’Automne and Artistes Francais without a single rejection. This included the present work, exhibited in Paris in 1930. In 1931, he was also included in the Who’s Who of European Painters, Dictionnaire Biographique des Artistes Contemporains 1910-1930 - a rare acknowledgement for a British artist and listed a few pages away from Maillol, Manet and Matisse. The only other Briton exhibiting in Paris of note today was Sir John Lavery yet not even he was included. After exhibiting in Paris, Lowry was contacted in 1931 by the dealers and art publishers Edouard-Joseph of Paris for a possible exhibition. Lowry responded positively – it was the first time Lowry had been approached by a dealer and it is notable that it came from France. However, to his aggrievement Lowry never received a reply. Only years later did he discover his contact at Edouard-Joseph had died, as Lowry recalled: ‘he’d been going in for an operation when he wrote to me and had passed away a week later. I’ve never judged a man for not answering letters since’ (Lowry quoted in Shelley Rohde, op. cit., 1999, p. 161).

That the present work is the earliest known depiction of a sporting match by Lowry is in itself significant; however, that it is a rugby match he first chose to portray distinguishes it further. Lowry’s enjoyment of following football is well-known, and is represented in another tour-de-force by Lowry of the same title but a later date, Going to the Match, 1953, sold by Sotheby’s in 1999 to the Professional Football Association for a then record price of £1.9 million (fig. 4). The painting is one of several by Lowry featuring football, while cricket is another sport he often referenced (fig. 5).

It is not however surprising that a rugby league match was Lowry’s first sporting subject. Rugby had become integral to Northern working-class communities, particularly in the industrial centres of Yorkshire and Lancashire. It was a different scene in the southern half of the country where rugby was predominantly a game of the more privileged classes centred around the private school and university network. Northern clubs began to compensate players for missing work in payments that became known as ‘broken time’ – this was in opposition to the spirit of the game as defined by the Rugby Football Union (RFU), which was committed to rugby being an amateur game. Consequently, on 29 August 1895, twenty-two clubs met at the George Hotel in Huddersfield to form the Northern Rugby Football Union (NRFU) (later expanded to incorporate more clubs), splitting from the RFU. Over time, the type of rugby played developed into a separate form of the game with differences in rules, scoring system and the number of players per side – the name of the governing body changed in 1922 to become the Rugby Football League. During the game's development over the course of the twentieth century rugby league became deeply entrenched in the social and cultural fabric of the north of England and matches drew enormous crowds (comparable to football matches), with the culmination of each season the Challenge Cup Final which continues this day.

Greater Manchester has several rugby league teams including Rochdale Hornets, Oldham, Leigh Centurions and Wigan Warriors but Lowry’s closest clubs would have been Swinton Lions, located a short distance from his home in Pendlebury, and Salford Red Devils. The present work is likely to be an amalgamation of Lowry’s experiences; however, the red flag seen flying by the ground as well as the red scarves worn by several of the crowd members perhaps hints at the Salford Red Devils, while other figures have blue scarves - Swinton’s playing colours. Typical for Lowry, he uses vermilion expertly here to balance the composition, which is particularly effective against the more subdued colour palette.

As is characteristic of Lowry’s sporting subjects, it is the crowd rather than the game that is his principle interest. ‘People think crowds are all the same. But they’re not, you know. Everyone’s different. Look! That man’s got a twitch. He’s got a limp. He’s had too much beer… It’s wonderful isn’t it? The battle of life, sir. That’s what it is. The battle of life. (Lowry in conversation with Edwin Mullins, quoted in T. G. Rosenthal, The Art and the Artist, Unicorn Press, Norwich, 2009, p. 183)

Match days gave Lowry a perfect opportunity to paint crowds in action – and draw out individual characters – which we see Lowry taking on for the first time in Going to the Match and provides the template for future depictions on the subject. Against an industrial backdrop, figures march across the canvas leaning forward in unison, which emphasizes their common purpose. The figures are more developed than later crowd scenes in which they are more summarily depicted. The men are all capped, some with hands firmly in jacket pockets, another beckoning to a friend, another with a cigarette dangling. Spotted among them are some women and children, a boy in shorts hurrying along at the back. Unusually, Lowry also gives greater prominence to the game itself, with the rugby posts clearly visible on the left-hand side.

This fascination with the movement of people, of which Going to the Match is one of the earliest examples, is a subject he was to explore and develop throughout his career, resulting in images that have become engrained in popular imagination. As Sir Ian McKellen observed:

Sporting fixtures were integral to Lowry’s aim to represent all aspects of working-class life within the industrial communities. Throughout the 1920s, his titles indicate his interest in the daily circumstances surrounding his subjects, such as Pit Tragedy (1919); An Accident (1926); The Procession (1927); The Removal (1928); Returning from Work (1929) – something he would continue throughout his career. A match-day was another part of life but significantly, it was a leisure activity and thus provided an escape from the difficult realities of day-to-day existence – ‘the battle of life’ – which are more often the subject of his paintings. Through Lowry’s distinct methodology, he was able to give a profound representation of sporting occasions, which is particularly apparent when compared to more conventional depictions by other contemporary artists.

Charles Cundall’s painting, Arsenal v. Sheffield from 1936 is an apt example (fig. 6). His painting provides a more photographic rendering of a match but is pale by comparison. The truth of Lowry’s paintings is not found in its verisimilitude; he captures something else, something more fleeting, but more honest and real. Indeed, the enduring appeal of Lowry’s sporting subjects lies in their timeless quality. We can still as spectators today relate to the energy, excitement and atmosphere of a sporting crowd. This was something Lowry upheld:

The re-appearance of this seminal work – showing the early development of Lowry’s iconic visual language and standing unique as the earliest sporting painting by the artist – is a major revelation in Lowry’s oeuvre and reinforces his distinct and celebrated place in the history of twentieth century British art.