Lot Essay
Lowry was a keen walker throughout his life and the present work, painted in 1952, belongs to a series of landscapes that are far removed from his depictions of bustling urban scenes. In some works the figures included are reduced to a few suggestive brushstrokes, dwarfed by the expanse of landscape surrounding them, however, in most, only a few scattered farm houses on the horizon indicate any sign of human habitation.
Michael Holroyd comments, 'The late Forties and early Fifties saw the production of landscape motifs similar to those painted earlier around Lytham St Anne's, but seen through a changed vision. Their emptiness speaks poignantly of time past. The dramatic use of perspective is the mastering element of these compositions, which develop the structures used in his earlier landscapes into a more expressive register ... Not only are such paintings convincing evocations of certain aspects of the British landscape, the lie of the land for example, and the specific qualities of the local light, but they also suggest a poetic or expressive content. In this instance, it is difficult to resist imagining the lately-retired Lowry revisiting an area, where as man and child, he had spent so many happy holidays in the company of his parents' (M. Howard, A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, pp. 211-212).
Michael Holroyd comments, 'The late Forties and early Fifties saw the production of landscape motifs similar to those painted earlier around Lytham St Anne's, but seen through a changed vision. Their emptiness speaks poignantly of time past. The dramatic use of perspective is the mastering element of these compositions, which develop the structures used in his earlier landscapes into a more expressive register ... Not only are such paintings convincing evocations of certain aspects of the British landscape, the lie of the land for example, and the specific qualities of the local light, but they also suggest a poetic or expressive content. In this instance, it is difficult to resist imagining the lately-retired Lowry revisiting an area, where as man and child, he had spent so many happy holidays in the company of his parents' (M. Howard, A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, pp. 211-212).