Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist, October 1974, by whom gifted to
Daphne Cordelia Ives, thence by descent
Laurence A. Ives
His sale; Christie's, London, 24 November 2000, lot 53
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
Stalybridge, Astley Cheetham Art Gallery, L.S. Lowry: Works from Public & Private Collections, 15 November-10 December 1983, cat.no.53
Salford, Salford Art Gallery, L.S. Lowry: Centenary Exhibition, 16 October-29 November 1987

Girl Walking is a fleeting figurative study painted during the mid-1960s, by which point Lowry was exploring individual and groups of figures at close quarters. The heavily populated images of the urban North that had cemented the artist's reputation were rich in their variety of people, both young and old, going about their everyday lives from afar. In the present work, the artist has plucked one such figure from the street and placed them under the microscope so that they can be observed intimately. The scale of the work is refined with the girl dominating the pictorial space, apparently walking at speed as she passes through the composition with one foot veering off the panel. She appears lost in her own thoughts and is unaware of our presence despite her proximity to us. Her face is distorted, which both enhances the sense of movement and at the same time acknowledges her position as one of many similar characters going about their business and populating Lowry's world.

As in many compositions of the time, the girl has been placed against a plain white background, so she becomes the sole focus. In discussing works such as Girl Walking, Michael Howard has commented that 'his people are individualised in a way that his earlier inhabitants of the urban scene were not. Unlike his industrial figures, they are not set in a specifically urban framework; the world they inhabit is nebulous, uncertain and empty, as mysterious and ambiguous as they are themselves' (Michael Howard, Lowry, A Visionary Artist, Lowry Press, Salford, 2000, p.195).