
Penny Day
Head of UK and Ireland
Sold for £50,000 inc. premium
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Head of Department
Director
Head of Ireland & Northen Ireland
Provenance
Mr Alexander Leggett
Private Collection, U.K.
Exhibited
Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, The Works of L.S. Lowry, 15 September-14 October 1962, cat.no.155 (where lent by Alex Leggett under the name of Mrs. Tom Baxter-Wright)
The 1962 Sheffield Graves Art Gallery exhibition, The Works of L.S. Lowry, in which Houses and Steps, Stockport was shown (see exhibition history above), was particularly significant for drawing both the publics' and critics' attention to the artist's smaller single figure paintings of the late 1950s. Allen Andrews in his 1977 biography of Lowry quotes the exchange between the artist's great patron, Monty Bloom and Graves Art Gallery:
'[Monty Bloom] The first time they reached the public was when Constantine, then the Assistant Director of the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield, rang me up in 1962 and said they were mounting a retrospective exhibition on Lowry, and he had heard that I had some of the later works. "I've never seen them," he said. "If you're willing, we'd like to borrow two or three. May I come over and see them?" He came and saw sixty – and he borrowed forty-eight. It was that exhibition at Sheffield in 1962 that really opened the eyes of the critics as to what Lowry was up to.' (Allen Andrews, The Life of L.S. Lowry 1887-1976, Jupiter Book, London, 1977, p.104).