Page 29 - Studio International - November 1966

L. S. Lowry : an unclassifiable genius

• Opposite and could talk to him for hours on any subject under the
Portrait of Ann 1959 sun until Lowry would ask them how they had reached
Oil on panel
• 21 x 17 in. their present condition; then they would immediately
In the possession of the artist retire into a morose silence. In a sense, these studies of
nature's rejects get beyond that silence, so that Lowry,
without a shred of conventional portrait technique,
attains, through his mingling of reality and imagination,
a degree of psychological penetration of rare depth.
These paintings brilliantly reveal Lowry's apparently in-
compatible mixture of sardonic humour and human
compassion and kindliness.
In recent years Lowry has been spending the summer
months at a hotel near Sunderland where he has a room
overlooking the sea at which he gazes for hours. He
neither reads nor paints while he is there but does an
occasional pencil sketch which he will later work up into
a finished drawing or painting when he returns to his
studio at Mottram-in-Longdendale. He is now nearly
eighty and says he is getting tired, which, doubtless, is his
right. (He also says that he's been tired for forty years!)
But there is not, nor indeed was there ever, anything
tired in the art of a unique figure in the history of English
The Lakes 1950 painting. Lowry is a cat who walks by himself, but few cats
Oil on canvas have ever walked with surer feet; alone among the really
28 x 36 in. good painters produced in England in the last hundred
Collection: Professor and
Mrs H. B. Maitland years he is uninfluenced and uninfluencing. q

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