L. S. Lowry
Among the most forged British artists there is, and the drawings are where it happens.
Lowry collected rent for a Manchester property company for forty-two years and painted in the evenings, telling almost nobody; the job only became public knowledge after his death in 1976. He studied part-time under Adolphe Valette, and worked from a deliberately restricted palette of five colours — flake white, ivory black, vermilion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre — over a white ground he mixed and then let age. The mill scenes and crowds are what carry the name. The late works, single blank figures on empty grounds, are the ones that change people's minds about him.
The first fact of this market is forgery. Lowry is among the most faked British artists of the century, and the pencil drawings are where the volume is: they are quick, they were made in enormous numbers, they are easy to imitate badly and hard to disprove without expertise. Any drawing offered without a documented history should be treated as a question rather than an asset. Expert opinion and provenance research are not optional at any level here, and they are the first money we would spend on a work before deciding a route.
Among genuine paintings, subject drives value at least as hard as size does. A busy industrial scene with figures, smoke and architecture sits well ahead of an empty landscape or a seascape of the same dimensions, and the market's preference there has been consistent for decades. Oils on board and on canvas lead; the panel is often hardboard, and warping and old restoration are common enough to be worth checking properly rather than assuming.
Then there are the prints, and this is where owners are most often disappointed. Signed limited-edition reproductions were published in the 1960s and 1970s in substantial numbers, sold widely at the time, and are now held in thousands of British households whose owners believe they hold something scarce. They are genuine signed editions and they are worth having valued — but they are a different order of thing from a painting, and the gap between what people expect and what they realise is wider for Lowry than for almost any other name we are asked about.
At auction
- The Football Match£5.6m
- Oil on canvas, 1949 · Christie's, London · May 2011
- Christie's, as widely reported
- Then a record for the artist at auction.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Selling a work
We represent the seller rather than the auction house: comparing houses and sale dates, negotiating the seller's terms, and keeping the paperwork and remittance in your name. What sets the value of a L. S. Lowry sets out what we look at first.