Encounter: L.S. Lowry

Can a dead artist direct another's brush?

On the Lowry Trail in Berwick-upon-Tweed

I’d never heard of the British painter L.S. Lowry until I saw the movie, “Mrs Lowry & Son,” which featured Timothy Spall as the artist. I’d seen Spall in a movie about Turner, which I liked a great deal, so when Prime Video offered "Lowry" to me—obviously because I'd watched the Turner movie—I bit. Spall played Lowry so engagingly that I added the artist to my "to be looked into further" list.

Lowry is well-known in the UK for both portraits and landscape paintings. His landscapes, which I think were painted generally in the studio, are based on plein air studies, often in the form of pencil sketches with handwritten notes about color. People who know of Lowry do so mostly for his paintings of little stick figures in city settings—there was even a song written about his work, "Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs." ("Matchstalk" means "matchstick" in Lowry's native dialect.) But he also loved the sea and, toward the end of his life, painted the sea increasingly.