Laurence Stephen Lowry R.A.

(British, 1887-1976)

Old Buildings, Edinburgh 53.3 x 43.2 cm. (21 x 17 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Lefevre Gallery, London
Jack Dellal, London
With Crane Kalman Gallery, London, 1980
With Crane Kalman Gallery, London, December 1987, where acquired by
Mr & Mrs I. Skipper
Their sale; Bonhams, Collection of Aspley House, 12 October 1999, lot 418
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Lefevre Gallery, Paintings by Josef Herman and L.S. Lowry, February-March 1943, cat.no.22
Liverpool, Liverpool Art Gallery, Paintings by L.S. Lowry, 18 October-6 November 1943, cat.no.38
London, Crane Kalman Gallery, Modern British Paintings, 29 November 1967-15 January 1968, cat.no.25
London, Crane Kalman Gallery, Modern British Art, 12 July-2 September 2022
London, Crane Kalman Gallery, L.S. Lowry, A 70th Anniversary Exhibition, 21 October-10 December 2022, cat.no.25

It was with his aunt that Lowry first visited Scotland, as a young boy on holiday:

'It was not often that Mary was able to persuade Elizabeth to allow Laurie to visit on his own; but in 1898, while her sister was in the throes of an 'attack', she took the ten-year-old boy with her own family on holiday to Scotland. There they hiked across rough moorland, visited local tourist spots, and explored the countryside on bicycles which they hired by the day in the nearby village of Scaur O'Doon.' (Shelley Rohde, L.S. Lowry, a biography, Lowry Press, Salford, 1979, p.48).

Following this initial introduction to the country, the artist made a number of visits to Scotland throughout his career, travelling as far north as the Highlands in the late 1930s, where he painted scenes at Wick and Thurso. Despite the natural beauty of the landscape, Lowry was typically drawn to the people and architecture of the towns which offered a level of familiarity based on his usual experience of the industrial North West and its inhabitants. The estuary town of Wick is located on the North East coast and here Lowry completed the impressive Old Houses, Wick (1936) and latterly Steps at Wick (1937, sold in these rooms, 20th November 2013, lot 29, £890,500). Steps at Wick depicts The Black Stairs, which formed part of the Scottish architect Thomas Telford's (1757-1834) 1809 scheme for the new town plan of Pulteneytown, for the British Fisheries Society. In a touching testament to Lowry's busy picture, the town of Wick in 2005 commemorated the striking canvas by mounting a stone relief plaque, reproducing the work's composition in situ. Thurso is located at the pinnacle of the mainland and the last port of call before the Orkney Isles, where Lowry completed Street Musicians on Shore Street just behind the coastline. The architecture in these paintings are imbued with an anthropomorphic presence; house and warehouse walls twist and lean mirroring the figures that they frame, in stark contrast to Lowry's depiction of buildings in his Mancunian oils executed in the 1920s and early 1930s where they are rigid, flat and very clearly man-made.

It was only natural that Lowry should at some point gravitate to the more urban centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh, with the former perhaps a more typical fit given its shipbuilding and docks that drew such a strong response from him. Lowry painted several works based around Princes Dock on the Clyde, absorbing its heavy industry, and drawn to the sea, which played an important part in his career from very early on through to his later years. Old Buildings, Edinburgh is currently the only recorded oil by Lowry depicting Scotland's capital city making it exceedingly scarce amongst his known output. The painting is thought to portray the east end of the Royal Mile sat in the shadow of the distinctive Arthur's Seat, which Robert Louis Stevenson described as 'a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design'. As is often the case with Lowry's work, the scene is grounded in reality but the artist has rearranged the topography of the city to suit his compositional purposes and integrated imagined elements. This is likely the case with the distinctive central tower which commands the middle ground of the composition and around which characteristic figurative groups and animals bustle. The most prominent figure, visible in the foreground, rather appropriately appears to be wearing a traditional kilt, further enhancing this unique vision of Scotland's historic city.

It was Daisy Jewell, head of the framing department of James Bourlet and Sons, Fine Art Agents based in the fashionable Fitzrovia, who famously introduced A.J. McNeill Reid, a director of the exclusive Lefevre Gallery to Lowry's work in 1938, just one year after Old Street, Edinburgh was painted. Reid was a passionate supporter of Lowry and organised a show for him in Edinburgh in 1944, which received good notice in The Scotsman, a paper not given to reviewing one-man shows in dealers' galleries. Following this, Reid had a number of paintings transferred to Glasgow for inclusion in his next show there.