L. S. Lowry
Collected rent by day and painted the industrial north for fifty years, in five colours.
Laurence Stephen Lowry was born in Stretford in 1887 and worked as a rent collector and clerk for the Pall Mall Property Company in Manchester for forty-two years, painting in the evenings and telling almost nobody; the job only became public knowledge after his death. He studied part-time under Adolphe Valette, and used a deliberately restricted palette of five colours — flake white, ivory black, vermilion, Prussian blue and yellow ochre — over a white ground that he let age. The mill scenes, matchstick figures, crowds and seascapes are the work; the late blank single figures are its bleakest part. He died in 1976.
Lowry is among the most forged British artists, and the volume of fakes and of misattributed drawings is the dominant fact of this market; provenance, exhibition history and expert opinion are all normally required. Oils on board and canvas lead, with subject as important as size — a busy industrial scene with figures sits well ahead of an empty landscape. Pencil drawings are numerous and are heavily faked. Signed limited-edition prints published in the 1960s and 1970s are plentiful and are frequently overvalued by their owners.
If you own a work by L. S. Lowry
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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