Stow-on-the-Wold

Lowry was first introduced to the scenery of the Cotswolds when he was invited to produce drawings for A Cotswold Book in 1930 by his friend and benefactor, H.W. Timperley. Lowry would receive a fee to produce twelve black and white drawings of local towns. Lowry was fascinated by the architecture of the houses and buildings, so different from the Manchester streets that he knew.

A series of paintings, all dated between 1947 and 1949, following a number of visits to the area, celebrate the local towns in brightly coloured winter street scenes at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, Bourton-on-the-Water, Street in Northleach, and Stow-on-the-Wold, the present work. Lowry wrote to his friend and fellow artist, David Carr on 20 October 1946, 'I declare I am forgetting to tell you how I got on in the Cotswolds - had a very good weekend - there is plenty of material - I should have to deal with it in my own way - the villages and towns ... [appeal] in a certain sort of way to me - I didn't make any sketches then but am going again early next year ... The villages are certainly very quaint. The stone (the buildings are mostly of stone) is very warm - I noticed that at once, as quite different from the stone in Lancashire and Yorkshire, which is cold and hard and bleak' (see T.G. Rosenthal, L.S. Lowry The Art and the Artist, Norwich, 2010, p. 163).