A Man Walking

A man walks down the street, his hat pulled down over his ears and his eyes set on the pavement below him, clearly deep in thought and slightly hunched against the cold. This man is a classic inhabitant of Lowry’s world, a solitary figure from the artist’s cast of characters, widely painted from the mid 1950s onwards. These solitary figures, usually men but often women, pass in front of us, and Lowry asks us to notice them and to contemplate their universe. Lowry wanted to draw attention to the vulnerable, the lonely, the comical, or just the underdog. By featuring this figure with the backdrop of a straight line of simple railings and framed by the side of a building for scale, he is presenting him to us and asking us to consider his significance.

Before the war, Lowry had concentrated on the industrial buildings in his art and the people that he painted in his cityscapes were small and lacking much particular detail, often even reduced to flecks of paint from his brush, to convey a sense of urgency in the monotony of their grinding daily lives. As the city changed after post war regeneration, Lowry began to focus on and to feature the people instead. Gradually increasing in size and status, by the 1960s, his figures are large and detailed enough to feature as the subject of a painting.