Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A.

Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd, London
Dr. C.H. Goldman
His sale, Sotheby's London, 14th November 1984, lot 130, where acquired by the late owner

London, Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd, Paintings by Barbara Hepworth, Paintings by L.S. Lowry, April 1948, cat. no.17, illustrated.

Judith Sandling & Mike Leber (eds.), Lowry's City, A Painter and His Locale, The Lowry Press, Salford, 1987, p.44, illustrated fig.1.

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 the original stretcher with a layer of paint and an inscription on the reverse. The structural condition is sound and secure. Paint Surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows one small retouching within the sky in the upper left quadrant of the composition. No other retouchings are visible under ultra-violet light. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition. 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."

In June 1929 Lowry wrote to his friend and regular correspondent Howard Timperley, ‘To my loss country lanes have been foreign to me somewhat for quite a while past – for alas my recreation seems to have developed into drifting amongst all the back streets, etc., I can come across.’ (Letter to Howard Timperley, 14^th June 1929, quoted in Julian Spalding, Lowry, The Herbert Press Ltd, London, 1987, p.27). Completed over fifteen years later Peel Park, Salford gives us a glimpse into Lowry’s discovery of a place which brought these two worlds – the back streets and the country lanes – together in a unique fusion of the urban and the rural, the county in the city, one of the world’s first truly public parks.

Peel Park was opened with great ceremony in 1846 ‘for the enjoyment and recreation of the public’. Although the Royal parks of London had existed much before this, these remained privately owned estates, and the landowners regularly exerted their authority to refuse entry to those they deemed unsuitable. For the residents of the newly industrialised Manchester and Salford, Peel Park quickly became an important feature of working class leisure time in a world before the widespread advent of radio and television. Lowry made painstaking and thorough records of Peel Park over a number of paintings, capturing its expanse of landscaped scenery and populating his scenes with multitudes of people, freed, if only briefly, from the mills and the factories where they worked the long, hard weeks.

Lowry’s own affection for the Park is particularly resonant in this painting, which depicts the school where the artist studied for the best part of a quarter of a century. Perched above the park, Lark Hill Mansion was the home of the Salford School of Art which Lowry joined in 1915, continuing his studies therefor a decade, and remaining a frequent visitor of the galleries of the Salford Museum and Art Gallery until his death. Far from being the untutored painter for which he was taken by the critics of the day, Lowry was an unstinting student of art, and produced hundreds of academic life studies and sketches which prove his considerable skill as a draughtsman. Prevented from painting en plein air by both his full-time employment and caring for his bed-ridden mother, who had become increasingly ill since the death of his father in 1932, Lowry often made preparatory sketches from life but almost all of his paintings were done in his ‘work room’ back at home, where he often worked late into the night. Two such sketches exist for the present work, one circa 1927 (fig.1) and a second more carefully worked sketch from 1930 (both in the collection of The Lowry, Salford). These must have been crucial in Lowry’s conception of the final painting, particularly since the Lark Hill Mansion, which sits at the summit of the broad white steps which run up the centre of the canvas, was demolished in 1936, eight years before the work’s completion. Of course, the entire world recorded so minutely in Lowry’s oeuvre has now all but vanished, but this work captures a scene which had already moved on, modernised and redeveloped before the painting was even complete.

Lowry’s sketches of Peel Park serve a dual purpose both in highlighting Lowry’s faithfulness to the architecture of his scene, and also the elements which were products of his imagination, other people and faces which he may indeed have come across or perhaps completely invented, but nevertheless deftly inserted into his paintings at will. The preparatory sketch of the late 1920s captures only the salient details, the bare necessities needed to reconstruct the set before Lowry completes his park, filling the scene with figures that look most natural there: children, families, pets at play.  The railing along the bottom edge of the picture is, again, Lowry’s own invention; this stark black border appears neither in Lowry’s sketches nor in contemporary photographs from this same spot. Separated from the children, one lonely figure shares our viewpoint, gazing longingly while one small girl looks inquisitively back over the fence, considering the identity of this stranger. One cannot help but wonder if this perhaps is our artist, a man who by his own admission did not enjoy his own childhood but continually returned to painting children, revisiting a seemingly carefree world fast disappearing before his eyes.