- 58
Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. 1887-1976
Description
- Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A.
- Industrial Landscape
- signed and dated 1934
- oil on canvas
- 40.5 by 66cm.; 16 by 26in.
Exhibited
Catalogue Note
Although Lowry had been producing images of industrial townscapes throughout the 1920s, it is in the paintings of the next decade where his vision is honed to produce an extraordinary body of work.
The basic ingredients of the Lowry townscape are established relatively early, and paintings such as A Manufacturing Town (Coll.Science Museum, London) of 1922, we can already see the combination of thronging streets, humble, constricted housing and mills standing high over the area around them, their chimneys belching acrid smoke. However, in these early works, the crowds can often appear stiff and contrived, the individual figures and groups beautifully observed, but lacking an overall harmony. Similarly, the darker hues of Lowry’s early palette give the paintings a more Victorian and documentary feel. By 1930, when Lowry painted Coming From the Mill (Coll.The Lowry, Salford), it is easy to see how much more unified the figure groups have become as they stream through the factory gateway. The brighter palette, now applied more thickly and with a distinctly drier surface, allows the artist greater scope for creating spatial recession within the painting, and the ghostly shadows of the receding mill buildings give a much greater sense of both distance and atmosphere than in the earlier works.
However, there is a further development in Lowry’s work which would be combined with those noted above. Virtually all of Lowry’s townscapes up to this point place the viewer in relatively close proximity to the initial action in the street, often as though we are observing the scene from a little way away. Industrial Landscape, painted in 1934, may thus be one of the first examples of Lowry taking an elevated viewpoint, almost as though one is hovering over the town, observing the life below from afar. There are precedents, such as The Bandstand, Peel Park (Coll.City Art Gallery, York) of 1931, but the parapet that runs right across the foreground makes it clear that we are simply standing on a high building. This painting derives from a group of drawings of 1924-5 drawn from a window high in the Royal Technical College where the art school was housed. Industrial Landscape though uses no such devices to anchor the viewer and Lowry’s carefully constructed composition helps to draw us in. As we follow the gently curving road that takes into the heart of the painting, its path emphasised by the tram lines, we pass a local football pitch where large crowds are gathered, the distance allowing Lowry to reduce the figures to the barest essentials and concentrate on the movement. With the merest strokes of colour, the players are shown, with the grouping around the goalmouth perhaps suggesting a moment of drama.
Lowry’s rendition of the streets and buildings of the middle distance is unusually atmospheric, and apart from the occasional spot of red or a touch of pinkish brick, the palette is extremely monochromatic. By removing the distractions of colour, the forms of the buildings and the monotonous regularity of the terraced housing is brought starkly into focus. Behind the dwellings of the workers though stand the huge looming mills, dwarfing all around them and almost appearing like advancing giants that will crush all that stands in their way. Their chimneys stretch even higher above the ground, plumes of smoke, hinting at activity within, drifting away and filling the atmosphere with a greyish smog that settles over the entire scene.
Into the 1940s and 1950s, the raised viewpoint that appears in Industrial Landscape was to become perhaps the most distinctive feature of the ‘classic’ Lowry image, with enormous imagined vistas offering him huge scope. Thus in works such as Industrial Landscape: River Scene (Coll.Leicester Art Gallery) of 1950 Industrial Landscape (Coll.Tate Gallery, London) of 1955, or Sunday Afternoon (Private Collection), the panorama encompasses a huge range of motifs, from the factories and terraced houses to waterways, viaducts and open spaces, drawing from the artist’s imagination images that whilst invented still carry an evocative and nostalgic sense of the industrial cities of the north of England in the early years of the twentieth century.