L. S. Lowry, The Fever Van, 1935; Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool, UK)
L. S. Lowry (1887–1976) was the leading painter of old industrial Britain, of the crowded streets of Lancashire cotton towns dominated by factory chimneys and oblong, chunky mills. Now that the industrial North of England and the mining and steel towns of South Wales, which he also painted, have subsided into obsolescence and Rust Belt–decay, it can hardly be said that these are portrayals of modern life. But the scenes in his pictures were very modern when he painted them; such is the speed of change of modernity.
Lowry’s work was immensely popular with ordinary folk in Britain who hung reproductions of his paintings on the walls of their homes. Lowry, who worked for forty-two years as a local rent collector, painted what he knew and what they knew. Fashionable metropolitan curators and artists rarely visited, let alone painted, the industrial areas—they saw them as grim, as regional, as unfit subjects for art. They never visited the provincial museums where much of Lowry’s work was on display. They were condescending when the socialistic Prime Minister Harold Wilson, who had a Lancashire constituency and on suitable occasions a Yorkshire accent, hung a Lowry on the main wall of his office and used one as a Christmas card. It was part of his shaky fake attempt to seem a gritty man of the people. Scorn met the appearance of one of Lowry’s most popular paintings,