Visions of Matchstick Men and Icons of Industrialization

ly referred to as L.S. Lowry, is remembered for being enigmatic and mischievous. Lowry, who rejected 5 different honors during his lifetime—including an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1955 and knighthood in 1968—holds the record for the most rejected British honors. Born in 1887, Lowry lived an upscale area of south Manchester, UK, until financial difficulties forced his parents to relocate to an industrial part of Salford, which he initially hated. His feelings slowly changed: “After a year I got used to it. Within a few years I began to be interested and at length I became obsessed by it.” Though Lowry struggled with schoolwork, he enjoyed drawing and as a youth spent his own money on private art lessons. In 1905, he started taking evening classes in Manchester, where he studied with the French artist Adolphe Valette, who introduced him to Impressionism. Lowry continued attending evening classes throughout the next two decades. Despite his enthusiasm for art, Lowry worked as a rent collector for 42 years, retiring from the Pall Mall Property Company on his 65th birthday. His day job accorded Lowry up-close access to everyday life. Jackie Wullschlager, chief art critic of the Financial Times, observed that Lowry “knew quotidian dreariness at close hand; he was also used to keeping accounts, and his paintings display an unsentimental, ledger-like notation of pictorial facts even as they become more compositionally complex.” Lowry’s best known works depict the environs and icons of industrialization such as mills, manufacturing plants, bridges, and railway stations. Smokestacks and chimneys atop factories and houses belch black smoke into the hazy white sky Lowry favored. His teeming human figures—commonly called “matchstick men” for their singular narrow vertical forms—rigidly move about their activities, appearing disconnected from each other despite their proximity in crowds and long lines. Focused, perhaps obsessed, with maintaining precision in color and tone, Lowry used only Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Color paints. Further, he famously adhered to a five-color palette of the company’s paints, consisting of Ivory Black, Vermillion, Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, and Flake White.