Laurence Stephen Lowry R.A.

(British, 1887-1976)

Sailing boats 29.5 x 34.5 cm. (11 5/8 x 13 1/2 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist, by whom gifted to
Frank Jopling Fletcher, thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

One of the earliest surviving drawings by L.S. Lowry, executed at fifteen years of age and listed as No.1 in Mervyn Levy's The Drawings of L.S. Lowry, is titled Yachts (1902) and was executed at Lytham St. Anne's, where the Lowry family often spent their summer holidays. Lowry was deeply connected to the sea, and it remained a constant throughout his career with images of pleasure boats, tankers or just open water interspersed amongst and providing contrast to the urban landscapes of his native Manchester. The sea was a calming force and provided an opportunity for reflection amidst an otherwise hectic world and as the years went on it became nostalgic and offered a degree of familiarity which Lowry craved.

In a taped recording with Gerald B Cotton, Lowry talked with passion about his experience of the sea and of his time with a herring fleet seventy-five miles out into the North Sea off Peterhead and Fraserburgh, his parents waiting for him on the shore. He saw amongst the currents and waves the same struggle which occupied the people among whom he lived and worked, the 'Battle of Life' as it were, and was intoxicated by it. In his text on the artist, T.G. Rosenthal writes 'it is not mere speculation to say that the sea, wherever he found it, gave him ample opportunity to work with his beloved, and so ingeniously exploited, white paint. More than the industrials, and more than his earth-bound landscapes the views of the sea had one overpowering component which existed on a much smaller – and frequently mostly hidden – aspect, namely an uninterrupted horizon where the preponderant white sky met the edge of the sea.' (T.G. Rosenthal, L.S. Lowry, The Art and the Artist, Unicorn Press, Norwich, 2010, p.208).

Sailing boats dates to 1922 making it an intriguingly early Lowry seascape and one which would have appealed to his mother who favoured these depictions of the Lancashire coast. The painting bears a debt to the artist's influential tutor, Adolphe Valette, who pioneered Impressionism in Manchester and encouraged his students to explore the variation of light and colour in their work as can be seen here amongst thick and visible brushstrokes. The inclusion of a figure in the boat located at the foreground of the present work is reminiscent of Valette's images of boats on the Manchester Ship Canal, which themselves were inspired by Monet's studies of the River Thames.

L.S. Lowry met Frank Jopling Fletcher at art college, and they remained lifelong friends. Lowry later painted his portrait, which is now a part of the Salford Museum and Art Gallery collection.