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L.S. Lowry
His portrayal of industrial subjects was based on the
most extensive and minutely detailed observation of his
subjects, accumulated in the course of endless walks along all
the streets in the limited area of his choice for more than a
third of a century. It would be difficult to name a painter of
comparable subjects whose works rival his. But with regard to
portraits the situation was radically different. He had some
devoted friends and his was a most likeable personality, but he
was surely among the most temperamentally lonely of men—a
loneliness exacerbated by his determination to conceal from
those who knew him as an artist, and from the public at large,
the dual circumstances of his life as rent collector and the
like as well as artist— involving him in a variety of elaborate
forms of deceit, the severing of relations with those who knew
the truth. This, combined with his natural shyness, indeed
timidity, resulted in an inconsistency of outlook that affected
not only his self-knowledge but also his ability to portray his
fellow men and women. If he saw them as odd it was because he
felt himself to be odd. Oddity he admirably portrayed, but
oddity is not the dominant human characteristic (though more
common than the casual observer is apt to notice). Nor can his
concentration on it be justified by any special characteristic
of the people among whom he lived. 'Manchester people,' he used
to say, 'are no different from people anywhere else.'
John Rothenstein
"I wanted to paint myself into what absorbed me ...
Natural figures would have broken the spell of it, so I made my
figures half unreal. Some critics have said that I turned my
figures into puppets, as if my aim were to hint at the hard
economic necessities that drove them. To say the truth, I was
not thinking very much about the people. I did not care for them
in the way a social reformer does. They are part of a private
beauty that haunted me. I loved them and the houses in the same
way: as part of a vision.”
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