1960 - In Pendlebury

In Pendlebury 1960

Oil on Canvas 

16 x 10 in. (40.6 x 25.4 cm.) 

Sold [08 June 2007] for £204,000 (Christie's, London, King Street)

Signed and Dated 'L.S. LOWRY 1960' (lower left) and inscribed 'IN PENDLEBURY' (on the canvas overlap)

Provenance

with Lefevre Gallery, London, where purchased by the present owner in March 1989. 

Exhibited

Sunderland, Art Gallery, on loan from 1990-2006. 

In May 1909 Lowry and his family moved from Manchester's affluent Victoria Park to 117 Station Road, Pendlebury to a four-bedroomed, four-storey Victorian semi-detached villa in the countryside beyond the city. The move was necessitated to save money and the family was depressed by the loss of their social status. Here Elizabeth Lowry, the artist's mother began to gradually withdraw from society into the bed-ridden invalid that she would become, eventually requiring her long-suffering son to nurse her day and night.

Lowry later acknowledged the move to Pendlebury as the source of his artistic inspiration, 'I had lived in the residential side of Manchester - a very nice residential side - and then I went to live in Pendlebury - one of the most industrial villages in the countryside mid-way between Manchester and Bolton. At first I detested it. And then, after a few years, I got pretty interested in it and began to walk about. Vaguely in my mind I suppose pictures were forming, and then for about thirty odd years after I did nothing but industrial pictures. That is how it all happened. I wasn't brought up to it' (see S. Rohde, L.S. Lowry A Biography, Salford, 1999, pp.81-6).

The present work shows St Mary's Church, later demolished in 1964, and the Albion Mill that stood opposite.