L.S. Lowry’s 'Going to the Mill' | An Early Masterpiece Direct from the Artist скачать в хорошем качестве

L.S. Lowry’s 'Going to the Mill' | An Early Masterpiece Direct from the Artist

L.S. Lowry’s early masterpiece 'Going to the Mill' was painted a hundred years ago and, quite remarkably, has been in the same private family collection for all but one of those hundred years. It was acquired directly from Lowry by the journalist A.S. Wallace, an editor at the Manchester Guardian who had illustrated three of Lowry’s works in the special ‘Manchester Civic Week’ supplement published by the paper. 'Going to the Mill' is the epitome of a 1920s Lowry, when he truly becomes a unique voice. In the overall smoky, sooty quality of the sky and buildings – it will be a few years yet before Lowry begins to stage his visions of the city against isolating backgrounds of plain flake-white – we see the influence of his teacher, Alphonse Valette, who had been drawn to Manchester precisely for its grit and the Romantic quality of its dark streets and thick polluted skies, the poetic fallacy of heavy-set architecture shrouded in smog, from which individual stories emerged, lamp-lit for moments, before being swallowed up by the gloom. Yet Lowry holds our attention to these individual lives much longer (and this is eventually the function of those white backdrops, to separate individuals from the mass and to hold them in time). Looking at 'Going to the Mill', initially all we see is a crowd, drawn inextricably – like water pouring towards a drain – to the gate of the mill on the left. But Lowry invites us to spend time looking, and slowly the painting reveals the men walking away from the mill, the woman standing alone looking out at us, drawing the viewer into the lives of others, or the man carrying what seems like a large portfolio, who could be an avatar of Lowry himself. As such, the crowd is broken down into individuals, each with a story – a story that Lowry himself manages to capture with a flick of the brush, a weighting of the paint, a bend of the knee or turn of the shoulder. 'Going to the Mill' shows us that he is no naif painter of ‘matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs’ as the old pop song goes – this is an artist of true dexterity who is making a deliberate formal choice, abstracting the figure, in order to express a concept, the sense of a life lived in even the smallest, most incidental figure. His works are as composed and deliberate as Seurat’s 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte' but imbued with an intensity of feeling more easily found in Van Gogh’s early paintings of Dutch peasants. These comparisons are not over-blown, not least as Lowry, in the early 30s, was one of the very few British artists exhibiting in the Salon in Paris and gaining recognition for the precision and intensity of his vision. And it is important to note that it was T. J. Clark, the great art historian of French painting of the late 19th and early 20th century, who curated Lowry’s 2014 Tate retrospective and presented Lowry deliberately as another of the great ‘painters of modern life’. Lowry’s paintings are never simple renditions of what he saw on the streets of his beloved city (or, more accurately, cities – Salford and Manchester). Works such as 'Going to the Mill' are theatrical in their conception, which is why the ‘backdrop’ of the mill at Pendlebury repeats itself, often in altered configurations, throughout his works – such as the slightly later A Town Square, formerly in the Midland Bank collection, which sold at Sotheby’s in 2024. The city becomes a stage for an exploration of loneliness, isolation, loss, hope, although in Lowry’s hands the buildings themselves function as actors – figuring birth, marriage, death and the tyranny of mill-time, before, in later works, they are enveloped in an all-consuming white of Beckettian structure. Lowry was an inveterate theatre-goer who – intriguingly, instructively – cited both the 1920s ‘kitchen sink’ drama 'Hindle Wakes' and Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist masterpiece 'Six Characters in Search of an Author' as highly influential on his work. The breadth between these two plays indicates the breadth of Lowry’s conceptual framework for his apparently ‘simple’ painting. This conceptual reach, centred on the urban experience, is – as T. J. Clark argues so persuasively - what makes Lowry so relevant today, in our world of megalopolises, many of them growing at the same break-neck speed as Victorian Manchester once did. LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY (BRITISH 1887-1976) GOING TO THE MILL, 1925 signed and indistinctly dated (lower left), oil on panel 43.2cm x 53.4 cm (17in x 21in) £700,000 - £1,000,000 + fees https://www.lyonandturnbull.com/aucti... MODERN MADE FEATURING THE GILLIAN RAFFLES COLLECTION 01 May 2025 at 6PM & 02 May 2025 at 10AM Live at Mall Galleries, London & Online https://www.lyonandturnbull.com/aucti... VIEWING AT MALL GALLERIES, LONDON 29 APRIL TO 02 MAY