MENTION the name LS Lowry and images of his signature “matchstick” figures filling Northern street scenes spring to mind. One of Britain’s most beloved artists, he created hundreds of works — which sell for millions.
Yet throughout his life he regarded himself as a disappointment — because that’s how his disapproving, snobbish mother Elizabeth saw him.
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Now a new film, Mrs Lowry & Son, paints a picture of their difficult relationship. Timothy Spall, who plays the Lancashire artist, said: “She never missed an opportunity to tell him how much she despised his work.”
The movie, which earned rave reviews after it premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June, also stars Vanessa Redgrave as Elizabeth. Now 82, the Oscar-winning actress’s performance has been described as “mesmerising”. In one scene, she asks Lowry: “Where has it got you, this hobby painting squalid industrial scenes that nobody wants to buy?”
Director Adrian Noble, former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, said: “It’s primarily a film about the relatio-ship between a mother and her son. She suffocates him, slowly and systematically, but he finds release and life through his art and in the streets of Salford.”
Elizabeth was said to be disappointed with her only child, Laurence Stephen Lowry, right from his birth on November 1, 1887. It is said she had desperately wanted a girl, and found it uncomfortable even to look at her newborn son.
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She envied her sister Mary’s “three splendid girls”, comparing them to her “one clumsy boy”. Elizabeth, a former teacher with unfulfilled ambitions of being a concert pianist, has been described as a domineering woman who controlled both her husband, Robert, and their hapless son.
She became bitter when the family fell on hard times and moved from Rusholme, an affluent suburb of Manchester, to industrial Pendlebury, in Salford.
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In the film she laments: “What kind of a woman dreams of ending up in a two-up, two-down terrace in Pendlebury?” Elizabeth’s favourite method of manipulation was through illness, taking to her bed to force her family to kowtow to her demands.
Lowry’s early years were unhappy ones. He once remarked that he “didn’t like being a child”. Later he would paint a version of himself in his crowds, always standing alone or behind a fence, watching children play.
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After leaving school he had a couple of office jobs, before becoming a rent collector for the Pall Mall Property Company, where he worked for 42 years. He had always hated Pendlebury, then one day he missed his train — and was struck, for the first time, by the local scenery.
He said: “It would be about four o’clock and perhaps there was some peculiar condition of the atmosphere. But as I got to the top of the steps I saw the Acme Mill, a great square red block with the cottages running in rows right up to it — and suddenly I knew what I had to paint.”
Lowry had attended evening art classes, first at Manchester’s Municipal School of Art, under French impressionist Adolphe Valette, then at the Salford School of Art. One tutor, Bernard Taylor, told him his paintings were too dark, so Lowry began using plain white paper as a background, which then featured throughout most of his works.
The bleak industrial settings, in which he only ever used five colours, echoed his own melancholy. He once said of his herds of stick figures: “All my people are lonely, and crowds are the most lonely thing of all.”
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But the subject matter displeased Elizabeth. Actor Timothy — who played another iconic British artist, JMW Turner, in 2014 film Mr Turner — said: “What he was painting was a constant reminder of the situation they found themselves in.”
Interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme, Timothy said of Lowry: “He was desperate to please her. He was brought up to be in thrall to her every wish. Even though he knew what he was painting was annoying her, there was a slight stubbornness. That tension is in his paintings. I think it’s fallen out from knowing what he is doing is displeasing the thing he loves the most.”
In 1932 Lowry’s father died, leaving debts and a wife who suffered such depression and neurosis that she became bed-bound. For seven years Lowry took care of Elizabeth, painting only after she fell asleep and long into the small hours. During that time he would sometimes paint grotesque self-portraits with bloodshot eyes, likened to the tortured soul in the painting The Scream, by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.
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Lowry said that one painting, of a wild, staring man with red eyes, was the image he saw every morning in the mirror. When Elizabeth died in 1939 — before Lowry achieved huge recognition — he was so depressed he considered suicide.
He said: “I have no family, only my studio. Were it not for my painting, I couldn’t live. It helps me forget that I am alone.”
In the last 20 years of his life, Lowry’s paintings were selling for six-figure sums to royalty and top galleries. Harold Wilson, Prime Minister in the Sixties and Seventies, was a fan, twice using Lowry pictures as his Christmas cards.
Lowry was offered an OBE and a CBE, but declined, saying: “They are ten a penny. They are 50 a penny.” He also rejected a knighthood.
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Despite his success, he never shook off Elizabeth’s disappointment, or the sense that the art elite sneered at him for having a job other than artist. He said: “If people call me a Sunday painter, I’m a Sunday painter who paints every day of the week.”
Lowry died from pneumonia in 1976 aged 88, and months later the Royal Academy held a major retrospective of his work, attracting a record number of visitors.
In 2011 a collection of his art sold for £15million, including a scene of London’s Piccadilly Circus which fetched £5.6million. In June another work, A Cricket Match, depicting a backstreet game in Salford, fetched £1.2million — four times the price it commanded just 13 years ago.
Actor Sir Ian McKellen, a lifelong fan of the artist, once slammed Tate Britain for not exhibiting its collection of Lowrys — which it then did in 2013.
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Now, as a testament to the painter’s position in British art history, a £100million arts centre bearing his name stands in Salford Quays, Manchester, not far from the mills that so captivated him.
Lowry died unmarried. He left his entire estate — nearly £300,000 and several art works — to Carol Ann Lowry, who was unrelated, after she wrote to him as a 13-year-old in 1957, asking his advice on how to become an artist.
For 20 years he mentored Carol and doted on her as if she were a niece. She said: “It was fate that brought us together, that enabled each of us to fulfil a need in the other.”
Just before his mother died, Lowry sold 60 of his works in an exhibition, one of which was bought by the Tate Gallery. It is said that Elizabeth was too self-obsessed to recognise the breakthrough and prestige.
Tim Spall said: “He didn’t feel sorry for himself. I felt absolute sorrow that he could never please her. But I also understood there was a steely compulsion in him.”
