Adored by the nation, snubbed by art galleries and hated by his own mother
How the popular painter’s genius grew from rejection and loneliness
SNOOTY curators at the Tate Gallery refused to show his paintings for years, despite having 23 of his greatest works gathering dust in its basement. And the prestigious Royal Academy did not elect him as a full member until he was 74.
But LS Lowry, who had produced hundreds of paintings by the time he died in 1976 aged 88, had always been an artist of the people.
His Northern street scenes depicting “matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs” caught the imagination of a generation. When the RA finally staged an exhibition of his work a few months after his death, a record 150,000 people flocked to see it, with queues stretching down the street outside.
Now the Manchester-born artist is the subject of a film starring Timothy Spall, who played J M W Turner in another artist biopic a few years ago. Entitled Mrs Lowry And Son, it explores the toxic bond between the artist and his mother Elizabeth, played by Oscar-winning Vanessa Redgrave.
Given that this relationship represented Lowry’s introduction to womanhood, it’s perhaps no surprise that he died a virgin.
“She suffocates him slowly and systematically,” says director Adrian Noble, and Spall adds: “She never missed an opportunity to tell him how much she despised his work.”
ELIZABETH, a teacher-turned-housewife who had grown embittered by her failure to fulfil an ambition to become a concert pianist, took out her disappointments on her husband Robert and their unfortunate son.
Laurence Stephen Lowry’s first mistake was to be a boy. When he was born on November 1, 1887, his mother could barely bring herself to look at him, so desperate had she been to have a female child like one of her sister Mary’s “three splendid girls”.
It didn’t help that Robert, an estate agent, was a weak and undemonstrative man, and Elizabeth would manipulate both husband and son by feigning illness and taking to her bed. The crueller she became, the more Lowry Junior yearned to please her. Life was equally hard at school, where he found it difficult both to make friends and pass exams.
In desperation his parents sent him to art evening classes to discover if this was something he might be good at.
It proved an inspired move. Lowry went on to become a first-rate draughtsman but, despite his obvious talent, his domineering mother had no desire for him to become a professional painter. Instead he became a rent collector with
the Pall Mall Property Company, a position he was to hold until his retirement at the age of 65.
In 1909, when Lowry was 22, the family fell on hard times and was forced to move from the leafy Manchester suburb of Victoria Park to Pendlebury, an industrial part of Salford.
“At first I detested it and then, after years, I got pretty interested in it, then obsessed by it,” said Lowry some years later.
“One day I missed a train from Pendlebury and as I left the station I saw the Acme Spinning Company’s mill – the huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp-charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out. I watched this scene – which I’d looked at many times without seeing – with rapture.” Not that mother approved of his choice of subject.
In the film, Redgrave – who has been described as “mesmerising” in her role as the ghastly Elizabeth – asks her son: “Where has it got you, this hobby painting squalid industrial scenes that nobody wants to buy?”
After Lowry’s father died of pneumonia in 1932, leaving considerable debts, his mother – gripped by depression and neurosis – took to her bed. She didn’t get up for the last seven years of her life, totally dependent both physically and emotionally on her son.
It was because of this that Lowry fell into the habit of painting his street scenes from memory after she had fallen asleep, between 10pm and 2am, using a palette of just six colours: ivory, black, vermilion (red), Prussian blue, yellow ochre and flake white.
As well as painting with both ends of his paintbrushes, he used his fingers and sticks to
‘I have no family, only my studio. Were it not for painting I could not live. It helps me forget I’m alone’
create the effect he wanted. Tragically, it was not until the year of his mother’s death in 1939 that Lowry made his first major breakthrough.
An exhibition resulted in the sale of 60 of his works, one of them to the Tate. His mother was too self-obsessed to recognise the scale of his achievement.
Lowry could have been forgiven for seeing her death as a release from torment but instead he became so depressed he considered suicide.
“I have no family, only my studio,” he said. “Were it not for my painting, I couldn’t live. It helps me forget I am alone.” During this time he painted a series of angry, red-eyed self-portraits.
But it was his matchstick men that brought him lasting fame; paintings such as Piccadilly Circus, London, which fetched £5.6million at auction in 2011 – a record for a Lowry – and A Cricket Match, which sold for £1.2million two months ago.
Indeed, his popularity is such that when a picture sketched in charcoal on a cafe serviette went on sale three years ago it fetched £9,000. And there are many other examples as, when he did not have a sketch pad, Lowry would draw on anything that came to hand, including envelopes and cigarette packets, and give them away to families who happened to be in the vicinity.
In 1968, rock band Status Quo further enhanced his fame, paying tribute in their first hit single, Pictures Of Matchstick Men.
By the time he died, Lowry was seen as an artist of distinction, though Tate Britain, by now much criticised for ignoring him, did not stage a solo Lowry show until 2013 when they displayed more than 90 works by the artist.
BUT Lowry was not a man who sought recognition. It emerged after his death that he had turned down more honours than anybody else – a total of five, including an OBE in 1955, a CBE in 1961 and a knighthood in 1968.
There was no Mrs Lowry to inherit his estate and so it came as a surprise that it was left to one Carol Ann Lowry.
She was revealed to be not a relative but a woman who had first written to him in 1957 as a 13-year-old schoolgirl asking for
his advice on how to become an artist. Lowry didn’t reply but months later, feeling lonely, he jumped on a bus to her home in Heywood, Lancs, and turned up on her doorstep unannounced.
With the approval of her mother, he became a sort of uncle figure, taking Carol Ann out for meals, to the ballet, even on holiday. These were rare social interludes in a life of an otherwise largely solitary man.
And for that we should, perhaps, be grateful.
As Lowry himself once admitted: “Had I not been lonely, none of my work would have happened. I should not have done what I’ve done, or seen the way I saw things.”