Normally we always travel standard or economy but Peter suggested we splash out and go first class, partly to ease the pain of having to get up at 6am for the train from Euston. I booked the tickets a couple of weeks in advance, to take advantage of the lower prices, but was surprised that even with the early booking and senior railcard reductions, they were substantially more expensive than going to Liverpool, for example. It took quite a while to go through all the hoops, as I had to rule out any which involved changing trains, and then alter my selection when I found out that the Lowry gallery shuts at 5pm, so we'd have to get an earlier train than expected to give us enough time looking at the paintings. The seat allocation wasn't straightforward but eventually it was done, the tickets were emailed to us and we looked forward to the trip.
I did my homework by reading my mother's old copy of the illustrated catalogue for the Lowry exhibition held at the Royal Academy in late 1976, not long after his death:
It wasn't until the afternoon before we set off that I printed out the tickets, although I had checked that they had arrived safely in my inbox a fortnight earlier. As Peter was glancing at them, he asked why the returns were dated for 11 September. What??? Somehow I had booked them for a week later than the outbound journey - and I knew they were non-refundable and non-exchangeable. They were also expensive, and we'd not only have to write them off but also buy new ones - assuming there were any still available.
As I was glumly looking at Virgin's website, I noticed there was a helpline and thought I might as well give it a try, though I wasn't hopeful. To my surprise I got through immediately and spoke to a very friendly Indian assistant. I explained what had happened and that I didn't want a refund, just to return a week earlier than the date on the ticket. He said if there was anything that could be done, he'd do it. He went out of his way to help, speaking to his supervisor and pleading our case. To my amazement he secured a deal which would reduce our loss on the redundant tickets by £10 each, and would cost a fairly modest amount for new return tickets with exactly the seats we wanted (admittedly standard rather than first class). He then suggested that if we travelled 20 minutes later than planned, it would knock off another £30. When he told me the total cost, I thought he must mean each - but no, it was for both of us, because the reduction of £10 each was in fact a refund of the full first class cost except for £20. The net result was that instead of losing a substantial sum, we were £3 in profit! For once, hurrah for Virgin!
We had a smooth journey, enjoying the comforts of travelling first class, including a hot breakfast. Salford Quays has changed considerably over the last 30 years and the combination of striking architecture and the light on the water made it a much more attractive proposition than in the freezing cold of November 1985:
The entrance to the Lowry was similarly stylish:
The foyer featured a wonderful piece of work - a "book bench", with two images symbolising the First World War - which is part of a series of benches around the area:
On a more prosaic note, despite having had two breakfasts I was feeling rather peckish so we decided to have lunch in the cafe first and a quick stab at the sudokus, before heading inside the gallery to watch a film about Lowry's life and work:
After that we were just in time to take part - along with only one other couple - in a guided tour of the gallery, which was very interesting and informative. What struck me most was how lonely and bleak his life had been. His mother, a talented pianist with social aspirations, had married "beneath her" to an estate agent. Lowry was an only child, educated at private school, and the family lived in a relatively comfortable area of Manchester in the expectation that the father would be made a partner in the firm. Instead, the owner's son was awarded the position and the family had to move to the much more industrialised town of Pendlebury in Salford.
Meanwhile, far from fulfilling his mother's dream of his becoming a barrister or doctor, Lowry left school at 17 and started working full time as a claims clerk in an insurance company. He was studying art at evening classes, as he continued to do for about 20 years, but this didn't help the atmosphere at home as his mother regarded art as greatly inferior to music. Throughout his life, she was his harshest critic and his constant attempts to please her were fruitless.
In 1910, having been made redundant (through no fault of his own), he began working as a rent collector - a job he held for many years, eventually retiring at 65 having reached the level of Chief Cashier. He did his best to keep his occupation secret throughout his life, threatening legal action at one point if a newspaper which had mentioned it, ever did so again. He didn't have to serve in the war because of his extremely flat feet, which was a blessing but perhaps felt at the time like another rejection, increasing his social isolation.
In 1932 his father died suddenly, leaving substantial debts as the family had been living above its means. It took Lowry two years to clear them. His mother simply took to her bed and stayed there for the next seven years, until she too died. Lowry would work as a rent collector all day, go home to give his mother a bed bath and a meal, tend to her bed sores and read to her. Only once she had fallen asleep could he go upstairs to the attic and paint.
In 1939, when his mother died, he felt totally desolate. His painting was beginning to be exhibited and gain acclaim, but it was too late now for it to impress his mother - even if that would ever have been possible. He was overwhelmed by utter loneliness. It is doubtful that he ever had a sexual relationship and he certainly never married, and he now had no family. Speaking of his art, he said "All my people are lonely. Crowds are the most lonely thing of all. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else". He referred to his "lonely landscapes" and commented "Look at my seascapes, they don't really exist you know, they're just an expression of my own loneliness.... Generally I put nothing on the sea when I paint it. Perhaps a tiny boat if I must".
In 1948 he moved from Pendlebury to a house in Mottram-in-Longdendale, Cheshire, where he lived until his death nearly 30 years later. His decision to move there was curious, as he had already claimed that he disliked the village. Its one advantage was its proximity to the moors, and despite complaining regularly that it was a terrible place, plagued by constant rain, he admitted "I'd never leave the north of England.... Warmer climates don't attract me, nor does the sun".
Apart from an initial burst of decorating, he did little to the property and it gradually became rather dilapidated - and it was always cold.
His furniture was heavy and Victorian, he eschewed modern comforts and there was "stuff" everywhere - masses of clocks (mostly his mother's), knick-knacks and paintings. :
His studio - which he preferred to call his workroom - was a jumble of paintbrushes, canvases, completed works and bits of clutter, all lit by a single light bulb:
Even by the time he was earning a decent living from his art - as well as the income from his full time job - he lived frugally, with no phone, no camera, no car (he never learned to drive) and no trips abroad. Although, in 1943, he was commissioned as a war artist, this involved no foreign travel and focused on images of Manchester. He had quite a wide circle of friends but none was close (his funeral was apparently sparsely attended) and he disliked surprise visits.
He did, however, collect art, particularly by Rossetti and to a lesser extent by Lucian Freud. He had a passion for the paintings featuring Jane Morris and owned 10 original Rossettis, which hung in his bedroom.
His own art evolved through three fairly distinct phases. Initially he focused on the work for which he is best known - the "matchstick figures", in crowd scenes. Although he had spent many years studying life drawing and was highly skilled at it, he made a positive decision to paint in this style: "I wanted to paint myself into what absorbed me. Natural figures would have broken the spell of it, so I made them half unreal.... Had I drawn them as they are, it would not have looked like a vision".
He used a very limited palette of only five colours - flake white, black, yellow ochre, prussian blue and red - partly because oil paint was expensive. The flake white had a high lead content and turns yellow with age. Lowry liked this effect and instructed that none of his work should be treated to prevent it happening - a curator's nightmare. It was only as he became better known and his paintings sold well that he started expanding both his palette and the size of his canvases.
He painted the background in white - in later years, painting the entire canvas in white first - and deliberately used no shadows, blurring, weather effects, sunsets or sunrises, and avoided any trace of sentimentality. He was particularly strong on line, construction and composition. He hated charcoal and vastly preferred pencil, for its precision. It struck him as ridiculous that people would always pay more for an oil painting, simply because it was in oil, whereas he felt that some of his best work was in pencil.
For most of his life he was a prolific painter, working on several paintings at the same time. If one wouldn't "come right", he would set it aside for a while and then come back to it. He drew and sketched outside but didn't like the inconvenience of carrying paints around, so virtually all his painting was done at home. That also suited his habit of producing composite scenes, using parts of actual places and bringing them together to make a whole.
Interestingly as soon as Lowry became famous for his crowd scenes, he switched to portraits and then, in his final phase, to paintings of the sea. He still produced some industrial scenes but they tended to be bleak pictures of flooded devastation, with only a few people, usually on the margins rather than centre-stage. As he grew older, his view of people as seen in his work became increasingly harsh and satirical - even hostile and cruel at times. His painting "The Cripples" (1949), part of which can be seen in the photograph below, is an example of this:
In his 60s, Lowry experimented with biro and felt tip. In the late 1950s, he tried using watercolours but completed only a few paintings. "They don't really suit me... dry too quickly. They're not flexible enough. I like a medium you can work into, over a period of time." With oil, as well as his brushes he often used his index finger and thumb, particularly for faces. The one subject he never mastered was horses. He said he simply couldn't draw their legs accurately. That's why there is only one horse in any of his paintings, and its legs are hidden behind a wall.
Real fame came late, with the offer of a knighthood when he was 74. He rejected it, along with other honours. He felt uncomfortable with the idea of this social distinction and in any case it would only have made a real difference to him while his mother was still alive.
There is one mystery about his portraits, and that is the identity of Ann, who featured in a number of his paintings and drawings during the 1950s and 60s:
She appears to be a composite figure rather than based on one real person, always depicted with swept-back hair and kohled eyes, and an oval face. Less benign were the erotic and sadistic paintings and drawings of dark-haired women which came to light after Lowry's death. They weren't casual pieces but had been revisited and reworked, almost like an obsession. Given his lonely and repressed life, and the influence of his mother, they aren't surprising but they certainly make uncomfortable viewing.
Overall I found the experience of learning about his life and viewing his work - augmented by an exhibition of photographs of him taken by Clive Arrowsmith which, unlike everything else on display, we were allowed to photograph - very interesting, albeit bleak. Always an outsider, as a large and clumsy child through to a depressed and isolated old man, his life seems to have been dominated by loneliness. Far from feeling released by the death of his mother, he never really recovered from the desolation it wrought. His own assessment was "Had I not been lonely, none of my work would have happened. I should not have done what I've done, nor seen the way I saw things. I work because there's nothing else to do".
Afterwards I felt in need of some retail therapy and headed into the Lowry outlet mall:
It proved a disappointment, with nothing worth a second look, so we caught the tram back to Manchester and enjoyed an early dinner in Carluccio's. After a glass of red wine, the world soon appeared in a rosier light.
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