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A Private View of L.S. Lowry (A Methuen paperback)

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This is considered the most complete and authoritative biography of the artist L.S. Lowry. It tells the story of a life of dedication to Art , and of a personal isolation mitigated by friendship. Lowry's great revelatory moment was when his parents and he were forced to move from one side of Manchester, the wealthy, to the other, the world of the mills. It would be the mills, the world of urban hardship and poverty which inspired his most well- known work. And his pictures of the industrial landscape filled with figures of sticklike isolated human beings would become his most well- known work. Later he would change his subject, devote himself more to portraits which were most powerful when they revealed a kind of oddness and sadness of soul in their subjects. That oddness and sadness too characterized in some way Lowry himself.

Emotionally his story is of prolonged and close ties to his parents, especially his mother. A petulant dissatisfied woman she nonetheless held him emotionally. He with care nursed her for the last seven years of her life when she was unable to move. And he said after she died that the meaning and purpose had gone out of his life. And in some way he did feel this throughout though in the last thirty some odd years of his life his work was increasingly recognized and appreciated.

Lowry lived a ' double- life' as artist and rent- collector, something which he did much to hide. He was known as a good friend and especially generous to young artists after he himself became successful.

This work is an exhaustively researched one.

I might add, that it focuses on the life. And while there are a number of outstanding passages describing the work , and much background information which will certainly help any student of the work understand it better, the heart of this work is a very careful and skilled telling of Lowry's life- story.