INDUSTRIAL CITY 1948
Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887 – 1976)
Details
- Dimension
- 63.5 X 76 CM
- Media
- OIL ON CANVAS
- Accession number
- P30
Summary
Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887–1976) was born in Old Trafford and studied in the evening at Manchester Municipal College of Art. He was a solitary man who rarely left the North West, finding his inspiration in the landscape of North Wales and Lancashire, and in the streets of Manchester and Salford. Lowry restricted his palette to black, vermillion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre and flake white. Whilst there is a naivety in his rendition, he deftly caught the hustle and bustle of men, women and dogs on the move against a background of terraced houses, mills and factories. The exact location of his works was rarely stated as Lowry often worked from memory, calling his paintings dreamscapes ‘part real, and part imaginary … bits and pieces of my home locality. I don’t even know I’m putting them in. They just crop up like things do in dream’.
My Yard, British Council 2009
Glossary
-
Landscape
Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.