A Lowry portrait has been sold for a record sum at auction.
Father and two sons sold for £1.7m at Sotheby’s after being put up for sale by art collector Frank Cohen who bought the painting’ which dates from 1950, after selling his DIY business.
According to the painting’s notes, the three figures depicted are very much Salford men, from the streets, factories and pubs of Manchester’s twin city across the River Irwell; the father Lowry’s Manchester Man (1936-7), revisited years later, stripped of his pride and hope and turning in ever-decreasing circles of low wages and low expectations.
“Indeed he is on the same agonising journey of slow social degradation that Lowry’s own father went through, dragging the family from the leafy and relatively affluent suburb of Victoria Park to the rougher streets of Pendlebury. The painting can therefore be read as being extremely specific to Lowry’s life, a form of self-portrait, in which the two sons could both be the artist himself, the one on the right retaining a glimmer of his mother’s ambition for better things, the one on the left, narrower, more pinched, standing as the spitting image of his father’s failure.”
Father and Two Sons was bought from Lowry by the Stockport-based businessman Monty Bloom, who specialized in buying up failing businesses, making them viable, then selling them on
It was Bloom’s support, he bought hundreds of works, that allowed Lowry to extend himself in the final two decades of his life
It isn’t the highest amount raised by the sale of a Lowry, that honour goes to his 1949 landscape The Football Match sold for £5.6m in 2011.
