Footnotes

Provenance
With Grove Fine Art, Manchester, from whom acquired by the family of the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

In 1930 Lowry was approached by the Manchester University Settlement, a charitable institution tasked with the betterment of impoverished areas of the city, to explore the idea of collaboration. Lowry was already a well-established name with a decade of exhibiting experience behind him (in Paris, London, Leeds and Manchester) and, as a local known primarily for his pictures of urban life, a natural fit for the Settlement's mission. Lowry's experience as a rent collector imbued him with compassion for the people who lived in Manchester's poorer communities, and so was happy to support the Settlement's cause. It was agreed that Lowry would produce a suite of drawings depicting Ancoats, a notorious 'slum' area composed of tenement buildings and workers' cottages under the shadows of viaducts and chimneys. The resultant exhibition, entitled Twenty-Six Drawings of Ancoats, by L.S. Lowry was held at the Settlement's own Ancoats hall in March. As announced in the Manchester Guardian, the drawings were priced at 4gns per framed work to generate funds for the Settlement, with many (and by some reports all) selling during the narrow two-day exhibition run. Not all the drawings shown are now identifiable, and whilst the present work does not match the catalogue by title, in subject and date it fits precisely.

In the broader view of Lowry's overall output these works hold key importance. The Ancoats exhibition, a decade into his artistic career, marks the earliest known public showing of drawings by Lowry. As evidenced by their sheer quality, matched in further examples of this date, Lowry had begun to view his drawings as finished artworks, as opposed to a preparatory stage prior to work in oils. In works such as Tenements, Jersey Street, Manchester, the known examples from the Ancoats exhibition, and indeed other works of this year such as The Organ Grinder (sold in these rooms in 2013, £151,000), Lowry's flawless showcase of draftsmanship suggests that he revelled in this new mindset.

Tenements, Jersey Street, Manchester depicts Ancoats' tenements (destroyed in 1960) and those that dwelled within. Lowry has delighted in noting figures scurrying up and down the many flights of stairs, and others watching the city from the balconied entrance ways. Children and adults sidle up and down Jersey street itself, with a lone figure set dead centre observing the scene in the manner Lowry had. Lowry reproduced the composition with the figures in an alternate positioning in the oil Dwellings (1932) shown at the Lefevre gallery in 1951, and again in pencil in 1934.

For an in-depth examination of Lowry's Ancoats drawings please see Ann M. Wagner's 2017 essay Lowry and the Local, British Art Studies, Issue 5.