Exhibitions - Previous Exhibitions - L S Lowry 08.03.08 - 30.03.08 - View gallery Laurence Stephen Lowry was born on the 1st November 1887 in Barret Street, Stretford. Showing his artistic and creative tendencies at an early age, Lowry is quoted as saying "Started when I was fifteen. Don't know why. Aunt said I was no good for anything else, so they might as well send me to Art School.."
On 4 May 1909 Lowry and his parents, Robert and Elizabeth, moved from Manchester's affluent Victoria Park to 117 Station Road, Pendlebury, a four-bedroomed, four-storey Victorian semi-detached villa in the countryside beyond the city. The move was instigated for financial reasons and the family hated the new surroundings and their loss of social standing. Here Elizabeth Lowry began to withdraw gradually from society into the bed-ridden invalid that she would become, eventually requiring her long-suffering son to nurse her day and night.
Later Lowry acknowledged the move to Pendlebury as the source of his artistic inspiration, 'I had lived in the residential side of Manchester - a very nice residential side - and then I went to live in Pendlebury - one of the most industrial villages in the countryside mid-way between Manchester and Bolton ... Vaguely in my mind I suppose pictures were forming, and then for about thirty-odd years after that I did nothing but industrial pictures'. He would recall "At fist I hated it, then I got pretty interested in it, then obsessed by it." Lowry worked as a rent collector for the Pall Mall Property Company, but kept his job a secret for fear of being thought of as a "weekend painter". He remained in this position until his retirement in 1952. The people he saw, the sights of children playing in the streets, gossips on the front steps and the workers trudging off to their daily grind, became the backbone of his work. The industrial scenes of factories and mills with people streaming in and out of them depicted real life, honest and moving, the reality of newly industrialised Manchester.
Lowry used a very basic range of colours, muted against a white background. He used a total of six colours - ivory, black, vermilion (red), Prussian blue, yellow ochre and flake white, but never used a medium with which to mix them. The muted colours were emblematic of the sooty skies, the bricks of the factories and the dark clothes worn by the workers.
Lowry was hugely successful in his lifetime, the General Post Office issued a stamp reproducing one of his paintings, he was appointed the official artist at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 and even turned down an O.B.E, a C.B.E, a C.H. (twice) and a knighthood on the grounds that he saw little point in receiving awards after the death of his mother.
On February 23rd 1976 at the age of 88, LS Lowry died, months before a retrospective exhibition opened at the Royal Academy. His status as one of England's finest artists was confirmed in 2000, with the building of a new art museum in Salford - The Lowry, which houses an important collection of his work.
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