Lot #2613: L. S. LOWRY - Pipe Smoker - Pencil drawing

 

Artist: L. S. Lowry (English, 1887 - 1976).
Title: "Pipe Smoker".
Medium: Pencil drawing.
Date: Composed 1958.
Dimensions: Overall size: 10 3/8 x 13 9/16 in. (264 x 344 mm). Image size: 10 3/8 x 13 5/16 in. (264 x 338 mm).
Lot Note(s): Signed lower right. Cream wove lightweight paper. Very good condition; would be very good to fine save for a small ballpoint pen signature on the upper right margin, verso – when the drawing is laid on a flat surface, such as a mat board, the signature does not telegraph through to the recto; annotated “1958” in pencil on verso. Provenance: One of a recently discovered small cache of Lowry drawings in Lancaster, Lancashire, England. Comment(s): Lowry’s figural compositions are generally the most highly sought after works of his oeuvre. Laurence Stephen Lowry RA was born in Stretford, Lancashire. Many of his paintings and drawings depict people in Pendlebury, where he lived and worked for over 40 years, and Salford and its surrounding areas. On 26 June 2013 a major retrospective on his work opened at the Tate Britain in London, his first at the Tate. Shelley Rohde has written of Lowry’s one person works: “Now he had a new obsession: his single figures ... who had lived for so long in the shadow of the mills emerged at last from their background to stand alone, as he stood alone. If he saw them as odd, it was because he felt himself to be odd; if he saw them as different, it was because he felt himself to be different,” Mervyn Levy has observed “Few British painters have provided in their drawings so complete and revealing a conspectus of their aesthetic, intellectual, and intuitive objectives, as L.S. Lowry.” Image copyright © The Estate of L.S. Lowry/DACS. [30008-1-15000]