Lowry’s race meeting tipped to go for £2.5m
A PAINTING of a race meeting by L S Lowry is expected to sell for £2.5m.
The work will go under the hammer at Christie’s auction house in London. But closer to home five pencil drawings, two watercolours, and an oil painting by the artist will go on sale at an exhibition in Hale, priced between £18,500 and £175,000.
The collection is in Look North, an exhibition featuring 70 works by northern artists, at Clark Art, in Ashley Road.
Bill Clark, owner of the gallery, said: “Since we published the catalogue for the exhibition the response has been phenomenal.
“An offer has already been made for ‘Street Scene,’ one of the Lowry works.
“It is a very rare, 1956 watercolour in muted colours. He only did a about two dozen watercolours and most were bright and garish.
“Street Scene was originally owned by Leo Solomon, who was a friend of Lowry, and head of the Rochdale School of Art.”
In sharp contrast to his paintings with industrial backdrops single figures and small groups of people were taking the place of crowds in Lowry’s paintings in the 1960s and 70s.
‘The Swinging Sixties,’ painted in 1969, is one of a small number of paintings which feature a girl in a mini-skirt, capturing the fashion of the period, and showing how Lowry was adapting to a very different era from when he began as an artist.
Bill said: “L S Lowry is still the driving force of the northern art movement and the forthcoming film, ‘Mrs Lowry and Son’ starring Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall can only help to increase awareness of one of the great British artists of the 20th Century. There is always a strong demand for Lowry’s work and his paintings and drawings are becoming harder to obtain.”
‘A Northern Race Meeting’ has been given an estimated price of £1.5m to £2.5m by Christie’s.
A spokeswoman for the company said: “It is a unique painting in the artist’s oeuvre depicting a day out at the races, painted in 1956 and purchased by the present owner’s father in the same year.
“The painting was included in Lowry’s centenary exhibition in 1987.”
The work shows well-dressed punters mingling in front of a line of bookies. There are no horses in the painting – just a small black dog. Bill said: “Lowry couldn’t paint horses – they looked like pantomime ones if he did.”
Also on sale at Christie’s is ‘St Luke’s Church, Old Street.’ Painted in 1945 it is one of only a handful of paintings in which Lowry portrays London. It has an estimated price of £400,000 to £600,000.
The Christie sale will be held on November 19 and the Hale exhibition from November 8 to December 8.
Included in the Hale collection is an oil painting, ‘Cock Robin Bridge’ by Salford’s Harold Riley, valued at £26,500.