LS Lowry, Going to Work 1959 © The Lowry Collection, Salford
Champion of the free, Laurence Stephen Lowry loved to paint the people escaping Manchester’s mills. Through paint he gave colour and joy to their lives and simple pleasures, as well as his own. These people were called ‘matchstick men’.
Why didn’t Lowry join in their fun? And why did he find it so hard to enjoy success as an artist?
Freud was talking sense when he said everything boils down to your childhood – like most artists, Lowry didn’t have the most pleasant of upbringings. Paint was his weapon.
