Lowry’s conversion
Man City fan Lowry tackles a rugby match for once... but it’s only the goal posts that give the game away. John Vincent reports.
LS Lowry was a Manchester City fan and regularly attended home matches, a few at Hyde Road and then, after 1923, at Maine Road. But it wasn’t the oil-rich football club of modern times and during his long life he was only able to celebrate winning the League Championship twice, once in 1937 and again, an elderly man, in 1968.
It was not surprising, therefore, that when it came to painting his famous crowd scenes depicting working-class life in the industrial North he would choose his favourite sport.
One of many canvases showing fans on their way to, from or at games was Going To the Match (1953), showing a huge crowd heading for Bolton’s Burnden Park, which sold to the Professional Football Association for £1.9m in 1999. At the time, it was hard to see this first seven-figure price ever being beaten.
Then, at Christie’s in 2011, his 1949 work, The Football Match, realised £5.6m ( just 60 years after it was bought by the late Lord Walston for just £250) to establish a new record auction price for the artist, eclipsing the £3.77m paid for Good Friday, Daisy Nook (1946) in 2007.
Lowry did paint the odd cricket match and race meeting but I didn’t know he had done one involving rugby until Coming From the Match emerged at an online Christie’s auction to fetch £2.05m.
It showed the crowd leaving Rochdale Hornets’ stadium after a Rugby League match and, yet again, the price showed how work by Lowry is still increasing rapidly. The vendor had acquired it at Christie’s in 2004 for £251,650.
Coming From the Match, painted with understated simplicity in 1959 at the peak of his career, is the only rugby painting Lowry ever created. Familiar arrangements of chimneys, electrical wires and red-bricked factories absorb the nondescript and monochrome rugby stadium.
In fact, it would be almost impossible to tell it was a rugby match at all but for the two, indistinct goal posts peering out from behind the dividing walls.
Lowry, typically, concentrates on the spectators, not the match, as they funnel out of the ground in varying directions through the chill, smoke-choked air.
The game itself remains incidental and it’s the study of people, their daily activities, habits and interaction in a changing industrial landscape that remains at the core of his work.
Finally, back to Lowry, the Manchester City fan. One of his most iconic paintings is Manchester City versus Sheffield United. Though rare for any Lowry works to depict any identifiable event, it featured a crowd scene at a Second Division fixture at Maine Road on October 22, 1938 which City won 3-2.
In 2016, City’s owners presented one of Lowry’s paintings to outgoing manager Manuel Pellegrini. The club declined to say which one.