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Lot Essay
By the middle of the century, the industrial conurbations of Manchester and Salford were visibly changing and factories and terrace houses were increasingly being replaced with new housing and industrial units. The teeming street scenes which had dominated Lowry's output from the 1920s were gradually replaced by a more parochial vision of the Manchester suburbs that the artist knew and loved from his rent collecting days with the Pall Mall Property Company. After his retirement in 1952, Lowry began to concentrate on depicting individuals within the fabric of the city, sharpening his sense of the macabre and the grotesque with his vision of the tramps and the jobless, the eccentric and the crippled. However, his pictures were always tinged with a sense of sympathetic humour, since Lowry also considered himself to be an outsider.
The 'contraption' which features in the present composition, and which continually appears in paintings after 1949, was originally an invalid carriage that the artist had spotted on one of his many walks around Manchester. As Mervyn Levy (op. cit., under pl. 87) records: '[Lowry] was intrigued by the driver's poetic appearance. He followed the carriage until, stopping in a side-street, the driver turned around and shouted abuse at him. Although Lowry kept a look out for the vehicle he was never to see it again'. It serves here as a symbol of individuality, as it travels in a different direction to the constant stream of purposeful workers approaching the gates of the office building on the right hand side of the composition.
The present work was painted in 1955, the year that Lowry was elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy in London. By this time, Lowry had adapted the smoking factories of his earlier industrials into a more modern vision of Manchester, with office workers, suited and carrying briefcases, on their daily route to the workplace.
The 'contraption' which features in the present composition, and which continually appears in paintings after 1949, was originally an invalid carriage that the artist had spotted on one of his many walks around Manchester. As Mervyn Levy (op. cit., under pl. 87) records: '[Lowry] was intrigued by the driver's poetic appearance. He followed the carriage until, stopping in a side-street, the driver turned around and shouted abuse at him. Although Lowry kept a look out for the vehicle he was never to see it again'. It serves here as a symbol of individuality, as it travels in a different direction to the constant stream of purposeful workers approaching the gates of the office building on the right hand side of the composition.
The present work was painted in 1955, the year that Lowry was elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy in London. By this time, Lowry had adapted the smoking factories of his earlier industrials into a more modern vision of Manchester, with office workers, suited and carrying briefcases, on their daily route to the workplace.