Shining a light on LS Lowry

If you want to see the artist in his work, leave the ‘matchstick men’ and look up at the lamp posts, says Richard Mayson

‘Ican’t think what you want to go to London for, you won’t find any better lamp posts there…” L S Lowry used to tell young artists who asked his career advice. When Lowry came to public attention in the 1950s and 1960s, he was often photographed with a street lamp in the background. It was a symbol of the streets that, as a rent collector in Salford and Manchester, he had traipsed around for over half a century, and privately captured in paint.

Of his stylised figures, his so-called “matchstick men”, Lowry said himself that “they are symbols of my mood, they are myself. Natural figures would have broken the spell of my vision, so I made them half unreal; had I drawn them as they are it would not have looked like a vision.” The same can be said of the street furniture he incorporated into his paintings with an equally judicious sense of artistic licence – lamps, lamp posts, telegraph poles, post boxes, bollards, gates, railings, signposts, bandstands, statues, gravestones, memorials and the occasional post and pillar without any apparent function. These motifs are often repeated and have great significance. They sometimes take on a human form but so often go unnoticed.

Like the dabs of paint that form the hats and clothes of his women and children, Lowry used lamp posts to introduce colour. The fact that nearly all the lamp posts in Manchester and Salford were, in reality, a deep leaf green did not trouble him. The muted vermilion lamp posts that appear regularly in Lowry’s paintings are pure artistic licence. Just as Corot lifted the muted colours of his pastoral scenes with the occasional splash of vivid red, Lowry seems to be trying to do the same in his industrial landscapes. An unnamed art critic, writing in the 1920s, described Lowry as a “Wiganish kind of Corot”.

Lowry was quite capable of lending character and personality to the most inactive of objects, frequently turning the minuscule into the colossal. He consistently breathed life into monuments, tombstones and street lights. He often depicted street lamps turned by 90 degrees to show the ladder arms outstretched, effectively turning it into a welcoming human form. In 1958, he could not part with a picture of a street lamp he