He didn’t just paint Salford’s smokey-tops

Lowry and the Sea

Granary Gallery, Berwick-upon-Tweed

★★★★☆

Other than Banksy, it’s hard to name a British artist who’s either more widely popular or more quintessentially urban than LS Lowry. This makes it doubly surprising to learn of a lesser-known side to the painter – one that led him far away from his scenes of industrial Salford, populated with “matchstick men”.

The Granary Gallery in Berwickupon-Tweed introduces us, instead, to Lowry the seascape painter. This small but immaculately curated exhibition of 21 oil paintings, pastels and drawings drops us, to begin with, amid a bustling seaside carnival: July, the Seaside (1943) is a wholesale importation of Lowry’s massed figures from Greater Manchester to the coast. By the end of the exhibition, however, the crowds have vanished. You’re confronted instead with The Sea (1963), in all its sublime emptiness. In this astonishing late work, the horizon is all but hazed out, while waves slowly gather momentum until their blue-grey crests threaten to roll out of picture.

After the death of Lowry’s mother in 1939, the 52-year-old artist found himself “bored almost to death”. She had held formidable emotional sway over him. A trip to Anglesey in 1944 spurred him out of his rut; soon after, he began summering on the Northumberland coast, becoming a regular face at the Castle Hotel in Berwick.

For all that he appreciated the joviality of the seaside, what Lowry really found here was a mirror to his loneliness. His boats and ships are strangely crewless, cleaving to the horizon: not human creations, but rather elemental omens. Early pastels of the 1920s are more picturesque, revealing the influence of Degas and Monet; but by the ’50s, his palette is pared back, effects of atmosphere achieved with the gradual accretion of layers of oil. The texture of these paintings is like haar, the sea fog that forms as warm air blows over the cold North Sea.

There’s something Dorian Graylike about Lowry’s Self Portrait as a Pillar in the Sea (1966). By this time, the artist had grown wealthy and famous from his crowd scenes. But here he presents himself as a single, inescapably phallic stack, buffeted by the same waves that have shaped the rock over millennia. Beneath the public persona, then, is a lonely, yearning man, claiming kinship with the sea. After this show, you’ll never look at Going to the Match in the same way again.

From Sat-Oct 13; visitberwick.com

New horizons: Lowry created works such as Tanker (c.1965) in later life