A Lowry painting of the North Sea has sold at auction for £840,000
The work simply called the North Sea was painted in 1966
North Sea is one of the finest examples of Lowry’s large scale ‘sea’ paintings.
These rare, seemingly simple yet highly sophisticated paintings appear far removed from Lowry’s normally busy, densely populated coastal scenes and his archetypal street and mill scenes.
Lowry had always painted seascapes albeit populated with boats and people from as early as 1914, they are almost all views on the North West coast at his Mother’s favoured holiday resorts of Lytham and Rhyl, never Blackpool.
After his mother died in 1939 Lowry could make his own holiday choices and the place he loved to go on holiday the most was the Seaburn Hotel in Sunderland.
He said he ‘liked it because nobody else did’ this was probably helped by the fact that the hotel always made a huge fuss of him during his stays .
These unpopulated seascapes first appear in the 1940s, which coincided with Lowry’s newly found freedom and improved personal finances thus allowing him extended holiday stays on his own at the Seaburn.
Here from his hotel room(always the same room) Lowry could look straight out at the North Sea which obligingly offered up its wide empty skies and far distant horizons to feed Lowry’s imagination and to inspire him.
Lowry continued to return to this same subject in various mediums well into the 1960’s and it is often suggested that we should see these pictures as images of loneliness.
In his 2003 Lowry exhibition catalogue, the great Lowry dealer and connoisseur Andras Kalman commented on a similar but smaller 1950’s Sea picture on loan to the exhibition from the collection of Glasgow City Art Gallery …
‘There is hardly anybody in 20th Century English art, nor among the great French artists who have even begun to re-state what the sea looks like, this is the cold, frightening Nordic Sea, seen from an un-picturesque shore, with nothing in it but waves. It still makes me shiver to look at these pictures, but all the same they are beautiful, I don’t think anyone since Turner has looked at the sea with such an original eye’ …
