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Lot Essay
Before Lowry painted industrials, he had been inspired to draw the Lancashire landscape that he knew around him since childhood from walks out into the countryside beyond the Salford suburbs. In a series of drawings and oil paintings executed in the early part of the 1920s, Lowry repeatedly depicts flat countryside seen from a long farm track, and sometimes the track ends at a farmyard with a distinctive farmhouse. There are a number of paintings and drawings set in differing locations, sometimes at Lytham, Fylde, Clifton, Worsley Moss, and occasionally the title is given as Arden's Farm, Swinton Moss, the location of the present work. The earliest known painting of Arden's Farm is from circa 1909 (City of Salford Collection, The Lowry), and the motif of the farmstead continues throughout the artist's career.
In the present work, which has remained in the same private collection since 1948, Lowry presents a farmyard with a few scattered chickens and a couple of inhabitants, near the gateway to an imposing house. The large house is a distinctive building, recognisable as the one at Arden's Farm from similar views of the same location, and the architecture of the house has been closely observed. The house and buildings around it do not change, suggesting that the scene has been drawn from life and is etched clearly in Lowry's memory. Tom Rosenthal records this recurring theme: 'the farm, far from being isolated abuts onto a large private house, with a partial view of other neighbouring houses, street lighting etc. It is as if a village or small town has grown around the farm on the left, with its traditional farm buildings and a couple of carts resting on their rear ends with the empty shafts, devoid of horses, pointing skywards. The buildings and the heap of dead hay and grass turning into compost are dark and dirty but there is a solitary splash of colour, almost dead centre, in the blouse or sweater worn by the woman crossing the farmyard [in the present work the woman tending to the chickens wears a bright ochre skirt]. Here the off-white surface could in fact be snow or slush, since it is traversed by several criss-crossing cartwheel tracks, and the overall effect is wintry, although not chilling' (T.G. Rosenthal, L.S. Lowry The Art and the Artist, Norwich, 2010, pp. 250-251).
Arden's Farm was a familiar location that the artist documented in paintings and drawings over many decades. Unlike the large, deserted and lonely houses of his paintings from the 1930s, the farm is a place of community and industry. Lowry seeks to preserve in his art the landscapes of his youth, in the farm and the cotton mill and at his favourite industrial locations. These symbols of permanence are recreated and transposed into the artist's later work, providing comfort at a time when the rest of his world was changing and evolving into a new and unfamiliar vision of modernity.
In the present work, which has remained in the same private collection since 1948, Lowry presents a farmyard with a few scattered chickens and a couple of inhabitants, near the gateway to an imposing house. The large house is a distinctive building, recognisable as the one at Arden's Farm from similar views of the same location, and the architecture of the house has been closely observed. The house and buildings around it do not change, suggesting that the scene has been drawn from life and is etched clearly in Lowry's memory. Tom Rosenthal records this recurring theme: 'the farm, far from being isolated abuts onto a large private house, with a partial view of other neighbouring houses, street lighting etc. It is as if a village or small town has grown around the farm on the left, with its traditional farm buildings and a couple of carts resting on their rear ends with the empty shafts, devoid of horses, pointing skywards. The buildings and the heap of dead hay and grass turning into compost are dark and dirty but there is a solitary splash of colour, almost dead centre, in the blouse or sweater worn by the woman crossing the farmyard [in the present work the woman tending to the chickens wears a bright ochre skirt]. Here the off-white surface could in fact be snow or slush, since it is traversed by several criss-crossing cartwheel tracks, and the overall effect is wintry, although not chilling' (T.G. Rosenthal, L.S. Lowry The Art and the Artist, Norwich, 2010, pp. 250-251).
Arden's Farm was a familiar location that the artist documented in paintings and drawings over many decades. Unlike the large, deserted and lonely houses of his paintings from the 1930s, the farm is a place of community and industry. Lowry seeks to preserve in his art the landscapes of his youth, in the farm and the cotton mill and at his favourite industrial locations. These symbols of permanence are recreated and transposed into the artist's later work, providing comfort at a time when the rest of his world was changing and evolving into a new and unfamiliar vision of modernity.