
Penny Day
Head of UK and Ireland
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Sold for £176,500 inc. premium
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Head of UK and Ireland

Head of Department

Director
Provenance
With The Lefevre Gallery, London, where acquired by the family of the present owner
Thence by descent
Private Collection, U.K.
Lowry was equally confident working on a small scale as he was on expansive canvases which is particularly impressive given the busy nature of his compositions. The present work was painted in 1951, the year of the artist's retrospective exhibition at the City Art Gallery in Salford. As with other examples of the period, Industrial Scene portrays a thriving urban panorama with the figurative focus on or around the factory gates. Their positioning at the centre of the composition is symbolic of the dominant role industry played within Lowry's community with everything else emanating as a result of it. As with several of the more bijou pictures, the present work takes on a truly impressionistic air which is not only apparent in the application of the paintwork but also in the structure of the figures whose free flowing movement is barely recognisable towards the top of the road. The influence of Adolphe Valette (1876-1942), Lowry's teacher at the Manchester Municipal School of Art from 1905-7 cannot be disregarded. The artist himself commented 'I cannot over-estimate the effect on me at that time of the coming into this drab city of Adolphe Valette, full of the French Impressionists, aware of everything that was going on in Paris. He had a freshness and a breadth of experience that was a very wonderful thing, as I saw it done by himself and his friends' (Cecilia Lyon, Adolphe Valette, Phillimore & Co., Chichester, 2006, p.116).