As one of Britain’s most popular and beloved artists, L.S. Lowry is typically associated with his depictions of the industrial north. Buzzing scenes full of smoking chimneys with men, women and children on the move brought fame and recognition for the artist from the early 1940s, resulting in several sell-out shows at his London gallery, Alex. Reid & Lefevre, and the infinite variety of subjects that Lowry was able to find in the subject for over five decades is remarkable. From the earliest paintings and drawings, dark in tone and subject, to the works of his last years, he achieved an invention that goes beyond the specifics of a locale to create works which have indelibly changed the way we view a street or crowd.

The industrial backdrop of mills, chimneys, gateways and terraces offered Lowry a fund on which he could draw to build up a setting for the people whose comings and goings were at the heart of every one of his urban paintings. Freeing himself from the needs of specific topography, Lowry was able to use the constituent parts to create huge sweeping panoramas or small intimate scenes, but which all retained the undeniable feeling of authenticity, the mark of an artist who understood how the physical backdrop shaped the lives of the people he painted. Indeed, as his later paintings became more and more concerned with looking at people, especially those on the edges of society, the architectural setting began to drift away. However, when the two elements are presented in unison, the images he produced have a feeling of life and movement that must be at the heart of his enduring popularity.

Mill Scene is just such a painting. The classic features of the Lowry urban scene, the mill with its domed tower, the chimneys, the factory gateway, the rows of buildings, are all here, but they are only brought to life by the addition of a crowd. Lowry's earliest crowds were often clearly an amalgamation of various small groups he had observed and can appear static. By the 1950s, he was producing some of his most skilfully composed crowd scenes, such as Going to the Match (Professional Footballers' Association Collection, on loan to The Lowry) and that sense of a crowd as being both a whole and a collection of individuals is just what we are seeing here. Figures head in all directions, criss-crossing their paths, others walking their dogs and in the middle distance a small crowd has gathered around some unidentified incident. The composition of these groups is also skilfully varied, Lowry nearly always using children and women as a way of introducing points of colour to manoeuvre the viewer around the composition. Familiar devices, such as the figures rushing out of the edge of the painting add additional movement, whilst some other points of interest catch our attention in just the way we would if we were walking along this street ourselves. A bicycle, an unusual sight in a Lowry painting, is parked at the kerb just by the gathered crowd but there is no indication of its owner. This machine of movement seems curiously alone and perhaps the most stationary thing in the painting. It is by devices such as these that Lowry brings the streets of his memory and imagination to life as surely as if we were to step into the painting ourselves.

The present oil was turned into a printed edition, which was originally published by The Sunday Observer along with the Market scene in a Northern Town and Level Crossing with Train.