A Lowry seascape thought to have been painted at the Lancashire coastal resort of Lytham St Ann’s is set to be sold at auction for over a million and a half pounds
The work titled ‘Beach Scene, Lancashire’ was painted in 1947, the resort was favoured by the Salford painter for his summer holidays
It is one of five Lowry paintings on sale at the Sotheby’s Auction on the 21st November including the work Up North and a work entitled the rebuilding of Rylands
While Lowry is perhaps most known for his scenes depicting the everyday life of industrial towns in Northern England, his beach scenes from the north-east of the country are equally as important and detailed, and of which, Beach Scene, Lancashire is one of the greatest and largest-scale examples.
The sea was a source of lifetime inspiration for Lowry – some of his first drawings as a child are of little ships, and we see the subject recur in various iterations throughout his career. Some of these seaside works are just of the sea, which are almost eerily calm and tranquil for a work by Lowry, yet they are also beautiful, as the complete absence of human presence is so unusual in his works. In contrast to these, however, in Beach Scene, Lancashire, is full of all kinds of details of the various uses of the beach by different people, from the individual expressions on different character’s faces, to dogs, to boats out on the sea, the atmosphere of the sky and the ebbing movement of the sea.
‘My mood … is over the people in all my scenes. I could not, I did not want to, paint them as they appear. The truth is that I was not painting them. I have been called a painter of the Manchester workpeople. But my figures are not exactly that. They are ghostly figures which tenant these courts and lane- ways which seems to me so beautiful, they are symbols of my mood, they are myself’
