L. S. Lowry in Mottram in Longdendale, Tameside, Greater Manchester

The painter L. S. Lowry (1887-1976) lived at The Elms on Stalybridge Road, Mottram in Longdendale, Tameside, Greater Manchester from 1948 until his death. His statue was installed at the junction of Stalybridge Road and Hyde Road in 2005. At the time of making this post, Lowry now wears a mask.

William Hoyle in Manchester

Many thanks again to Frances Clifford for sending me more information on her great-grandfather William Hoyle, the temperance crusader, along with two probably unpublished photos (recently, that is), the first being from Vol. IV of Onward: The Organ of the Lancashire and Cheshire Band of Hope Union monthly magazines (1868-69): by then, 65 Bands of Hope had been established, influencing about 20,00 young people; the second photo is from Hoyle's Daisy Ballads and Recitations (1891).

An interesting piece of information which has come to light is that the Bennett Street Sunday School William Hoyle attended is where L.S.Lowry's parents went, and where Lowry's mother was organist. In M.W. Lees' Bennett Street Sunday School 1801-1966 - A Manchester History (2013), the author notes the importance of the school to the people in Manchester's inner city area New Cross. This is where Lowry's parents met, and Lowry's mother Elizabeth studied at the school and went on to teach music and give her son his religious and moral background which would have such a strong effect on him.

My William Hoyle posts:
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William Hoyle in Manchester
William Hoyle in Manchester and Blackpool

The Art of Theodore Major

Theodore Major is a relatively little known painter about whom the writer John Berger said 'his canvasses deserve to rank among the best English paintings of our time'.

Comparatively little has been written about him, although a notable (and very difficult to find) exception is Mary Gaskell's self-published Theodore Major: His Lneigife and Works ([Appley Bridge], [1976]), which is in two distinct sections: the first nineteen pages concern Gaskell's father Theodore, whereas the second section contains one hundred and nine black and white photos of his paintings, which — although named — gives no indication of their date.

Gaskell states that he said that his painting was his life and art his religion, and he had many strong views, hating 'Pop music, pop painting, ignorance, gimmickry in art, cruelty and double-talk'. Leaving school at thirteen, Major went to work in a tailor's shop, a job for which he was totally unsuited and, ill, he became unemployed.

He began evening classes at art school until he grew tired of representational painting and branched out into experimental work. He met his future wife Kathleen at art school when he was teaching art in the evenings. Mary – their only daughter – was born in 1944, and her birth caused the family to be forced out of their accommodation. They went to live in Appley Bridge in 1950, where they stayed and where Theodore made a studio of the largest bedroom.

He was, however, producing so many paintings that in time he bought the neighbouring semi-detached house to store them.

Gaskell expresses regret that Major hadn't been invited to give lectures, 'possibly to a television audience, or a University', and devotes several pages to his writings concerned with generalisations about the nature of art, one paragraph of which gives a good idea of his aims:

'Art is the spiritual language of man; a language which extends the limits of his mind and consciousness; a key to "shock" the mind into awareness and growth; a door into a future understanding of ourselves, and finally into an understanding of ALL things.'

L.S. Lowry is an obvious point of comparison with Major, although Gaskell argues that there are more differences than similarities between the two. She claims that while Lowry viewed humanity as if from a hill, her father saw people from a crowd, and showed real pity for his subjects.

Many of Major's Lowryesque paintings were already in black and white, and although there is little evidence of the order in which they were painted, Major, apparently as a result of the atrocities he saw in the world – albeit vicariously through the media as he never went abroad and travelled little in Britain – states that his paintings grew darker and more menacing. Human skeletal shapes became common and Gaskell calls them:

'a universal symbol [...] without race or sex [...] no clothing to betray period or country'.

She also sees them as Major's symbols of the emptiness of the lives of people in the modern era. At sixty-two Major underwent a serious illness and felt an urgent need to communicate the dehumanising influences to the people he considered victims of society: he believed that the state, religion and the educational system stunt the growth of a child's mind and personality.

Gaskell reveals more of Major's artistic aims, of which these are a few examples:

'I wish to DISTURB and extend consciousness in the mind of the viewer.'

'I wish to shock into "awareness" the sensibilities of people; to attack accepted standards; to awaken the mind to spiritual values'.

David Buckman's obituary of Theodore Major in the Independent (27 January 1999) sheds a little light on the twenty years missing between Gaskell's book and Major's death, and a little more on the man himself. In 1992, having paid the full poll tax on his house, he refused to pay tax on the house he owned next door, and which he used as a store. The council threatened to imprison him, he told them to jump in the canal, and he was excused on the grounds of his age (eighty-five) and health. But the most interesting thing, not actually mentioned in Gaskell's book, is that the growing mumber of his paintings which necessitated him buying the other house was not due to the fact that he couldn't sell them but because he refused to sell them to rich people!

Clearly, Major is a fascinating artist with many outsider qualities. But some of his views are clearly wrong-headed. The most bizarre statement he makes is that many great artists and writers 'could only come to full stature in the British Isles', as if that country has some automatic kind of superiority: this statement is all the stranger because many of Major's paintings show a marked influence by European artists: Matisse and Picasso, for instance, are written all over many of his canvasses.

Art brut (Outsider Art) and associated:
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Rémy Callot, Carvin (Nord)
Carine Fol (ed.): L'Art brut en question | Outsider Art in Question
Kevin Duffy, Ashton-in-Makerfield
The Art Brut of Léopold Truc, Cabrières d'Avignon (34)
Le Musée Extraordinaire de Georges Mazoyer, Ansouis (34)
Le Facteur Cheval's Palais Idéal, Hauterives (26)
The Little Chapel, Guernsey
Museum of Appalachia, Norris, Clinton, Tennessee
Ed Leedskalnin in Homestead, Florida
La Fabuloserie, Dicy, Yonne (89)
Street Art City, Lurcy-Lévis, Allier (03)
The Outsider Art of Jean Linard, Neuvy-deux-Clochers (18)
Jean Bertholle, La Fabuloserie, Yonne (89)
Jean-Pierre Schetz, La Fabuloserie, Yonne (89)
Jules Damloup, La Fabuloserie, Yonne (89)
Camille Vidal, La Fabuloserie, Yonne (89)
Pascal Verbena, La Fabuloserie, Yonne (89)
The Art of Theodore Major
Edward Gorey's Yarmouth Port, Cape Cod, MA
Marcel Vinsard in Pontcharra, Isère (38)
Vincent Capt: Écrivainer : La langue morcelée de Samuel Daiber
The Amazing World of Danielle Jacqui, Roquevaire (13)
Alphonse Gurlie, Maisonneuve (07)
Univers du poète ferrailleur, Lizio, Morbihan
Les Rochers sculptés de L'Abbé Fouré, Rothéneuf, Saint-Malo
Robert Tatin in Cossé-le-Vivien, Mayenne
La Demeure du Chaos, Saint-Romain-au-Mont-d'Or, Rhône (69)
René Raoul's Jardin de pierre in Pléhédel, Côtes d'Armor
Emmanuel Arredondo in Varennes Vauzelles, Nièvre (58)
Musée de la Luna Rossa (revisited), Caen, Calvados (14)
La Fontaine de Château-Chinon, Nièvre (58)

Adolphe Valette in Manchester

'ADOLPHE VALLETTE
(1876–1942)
FRENCH PAINTER AND TEACHER
IN THE SCHOOL OF ART
(1907–1920)'

Valette was born in Saint-Étienne and studied in Bordeaux. He came to England in 1904 and left in 1928. He is noted for his impressionistic urban paintings of Manchester and taught L. S. Lowry, whose paintings to some extent suggest Valette's influence.

This blanched plaque is in Grosvenor Street, Manchester, on the wall of what was the School of Art, but is now part of Manchester Metropolitan University.

Southern Cemetery #2: L. S. Lowry

'IN LOVING MEMORY OF

ROBERT STEPHEN MCALL LOWRY

THE BELOVED HUSBAND OF

ELIZABETH LOWRY

BORN 4^TH JUNE 1857

DIED 10^TH FEBRUARY 1932

AT REST

ALSO ELIZABETH LOWRY HIS WIFE

BORN MARCH 5^TH 1858

 DIED OCTOBER 12^TH 1939

 'ALSO

THEIR BELOVED SON

LAURENCE STEPHEN

LOWRY

BORN 1^ST NOV. 1887

DIED 23^RD FEB. 1976.'

The links below are to The Lowry's brief account of his life (which includes his relationship with his mother), and to a lecture Manchester-born Howard Jacobson gave at the Lowry in 2007:

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The Lowry on L. S. Lowry
'The Proud Provincial Loneliness of LS Lowry', by Howard Jacobson

My other posts on Southern Cemetery graves:

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The Manchester Sound
Maria Pawlikowska–Jasnorzewska
David Martin
George Ghita Ionescu
John and Enriqueta Rylands
John Cassidy
Jerome Caminada
George Freemantle
Leo Grindon and Rosa Grindon
Eric Thompson

L. S. Lowry and Harry Rutherford in Tameside

The bronze statue of the painter L. S. Lowry, installed in 2005 at Jollys Corner at the junction of Hyde Road and Stalybridge Road, Mottram in Longdendale, Tameside.

At the side is a pictorial map of Mottram.

One of the pictures is a Lowryesque representation of Lowry's former house round the corner at 23 Stalybridge Road.

'LAWRENCE STEPHEN LOWRY 1887–1976

The famous North Country artist L. S. Lowry

lived here from 1948 until his death in 1976.

The paintings of Lowry document the lives

of ordinary people in the industrial

communities of the North West.'

And the house itself. Lowry was buried in his parents' grave in Southern Cemetery, Chorlton, which has been made famous of course through The Smiths' song 'Cemetry Gates' [sic], although when I went there I didn't realize Lowry was buried there.

Lowry's house was named 'The Elms', and the inscription is just about legible on either side of the door here.

And just three miles to the west of the Lowry statue, at the side of the entrance to Hyde Town Hall, is a slightly ambiguous plaque dedicated to another 'Northern School' painter.

'HARRY RUTHERFORD 1903–1985

The artist Harry Rutherford lived here, keeping

a studio next door. Rutherford liked to paint

popular entertainments – music halls, theatres,

pubs, the circus and the cinema and sketched

for his own television programmes

in the 1930s and 1950s'

'This blue plaque to Harry Rutherford is a replica.

The original may be seen at his former home at

17 Nelson Street, Hyde.

The plaque was unveiled on 20th November 1993

by Sir George Kenyon, DL, BSc, LLD,

a close friend of the artist.'

And here is the plaque at Nelson Street, shadowed by scaffolding from the house next door to it.

A previous blog post I made about Lowry's work is linked below.

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L. S. Lowry in Nottingham, England

L. S. Lowry in Nottingham, England

The exhibition of L. S. Lowry's work at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside, the University of Nottingham's Public Arts Centre & Museum (which ends 5 February 2012) provides an excellent antidote to anyone's notion (many years' ago trumpeted by a fatuous pop song) that Lowry was a painter of whimsical scenes in the Manchester area.

In fact the cover above adverting the event, although perhaps slightly disturbing in itself as the subject (quite possibly a self-portrait), is nothing like as disturbing as some of the paintings. An excellent counterpoint to this portait is Head of a Man (1938), which depicts a very similar although older man in a very different way: the neat jacket, tie and pinned collar are replaced by a rather untidy looking coat and scarf, the neat hair has become a little dishevelled, and the cleanshaven appearance by a moustache and stubble.

Much more importantly, the mélange of wide-eyed innocence and a face staring into a possible future void becomes not just a world-weary stare into presentday nothingness, the pronounced red of the eyes and the nose and the lines and the frown and tauter lips are not just an expression of the ravages of time and a knowledge that our lot in life has to be accepted: this is a detailed depiction of existential anguish. Lowry had for some years looked after his difficult hypochondriacal mother, and the portrait was made the year before she died in 1939, when Lowry reached a crisis point.

But, as the interprepretation notes make clear at the sides of many of the paintings (and pencil sketches in another room in the exhibition), a great number of his paintings from the 1920s through the 1950s express mental anguish. When we look at Lowry's works, we are very often looking at works of alienation, made by an outsider representing the world of the outsider. Here we have itimations of death, seen with the cemetery in the foreground or background, his mother's empty bed, or more metaphorically as a black ship moving toward the viewer. Here we have a tableau of people crippled in many ways, Breughel-like figures, the unemployed, houses isolated by water, landscapes with no sign of life, almost surreal shapes, paintings of horizon and sea or the countryside with no suggestion of human life.

And the human life Lowry shows, those smoky factory scenes with active figures in the foreground, his famous 'matchstickmen'? How much human warmth and companionship do we see? Like everyone, Lowry said many contradictory things, but he spoke of automatons, people rushing with intent, purpose, but that no one is free.

No. Throughout this exhibition ­— again and again — I saw the main subject of L. S. Lowry's canvases as not so much external to himself as repesentational of the prison of his mind. Thoroughly recommended. And admission is free.