Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A.

Alex Reid and Lefevre, London, whence purchased by the present owner, 1982

Painted on a sturdy support in good condition. The richly impastoed paint surface appears to be in good stable condition but would certainly benefit from a professional clean. Several characteristic and very minor horizontal hairline cracks are visible in the lower part of the picture. Inspection under UV light reveals that some of these short cracks lower right and at the extreme lower left edge have received some very light retouching - this may even have been done at a later date by the artist himself. The picture does not appear to require any further work. Presented unglazed in a traditional moulded gilt wood frame, the dull surface of which has numerous characteristics cracks running through the various mouldings. Though structurally sound the painting would benefit from reframing.
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Having 'found' his prime subject of the industrial townscape in the early 1920s, Lowry gradually evolved his style through the decade and by the early years of the 1930s, the distinctive manner of his work had emerged. Drawing closely on identifiable topography, the street scenes of these years have an immediacy and reality which constantly remind us that it was Lowry's job as a rent collector in these poor areas of Manchester that allowed him to see them in a way that made him invisible. It is this sense of involvement on the part of the viewer that marks out so many paintings of this period, taking us down into the street amongst the groups of people, young and old, who chat, mingle and pass the time of day.

Lowry's cast of figures is already familiar to us by the time of After Sunday Service. The cloth-capped figures who walk across the foreground, the groups of shawl-wearing women who gossip, and the single figure to the right who stands alone and looks out at us, all appear many times in his work but each time they are presented in a way which feels fresh and uncontrived. However, as in many of the best paintings of the 1930s, it is the almost anthropomorphic brooding oppression of the architectural setting which gives this painting so much of its power. The central presence of the church from which a stream of worshippers flows stands stark against the light of the sky behind it and stamps its authority on the area. However, even the church is dwarfed by the huge form of the mill building that slides into the right hand edge of the paintings.

By this stage of his career, Lowry was often prepared to alter buildings and even move them from their topographical locations to suit his compositions. The church here is unusual in its form, but is close in some of the tower details to that which appears in the background of The Fever Van (coll. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), also of 1935, and seems to bear a resemblance to St.Stephen's Church, Ashton-under-Lyne, an industrial town about seven miles to the east of Manchester. As places which drew crowds, churches, like markets and street incidents, feature frequently in Lowry's paintings and the rendering here of the milling crowd is masterly, with the artist using a limited range of colours but a wide variety of handling to give a real sense of a mass of moving figures.