Critical Review
St. Mary’s Church is a lithograph from 1967 by L. S. Lowry that features a view of a church in a town called Beswick in Greater Manchester. Groups of highly stylised figures fill the foreground of the image, as they go about their daily business; children playing football, adults chatting to one another and dogs out on their morning walk.
Until the final years of his life Lowry continued to draw obsessively, producing over 8,000 works, many like this one that were made on location as a means to capture the nuances of his everyday life. Lowry saw drawing as a medium in its own right, not just as an important step in producing paintings. St. Mary’s Church is indicative of Lowry’s adept handling of line and tone that certainly marked him as more than a mere ‘Sunday painter’.
St. Mary’s Church reveals Lowry’s precise style in handling depth and perspective, notably in his great focus on detail with the architecture in the scene. Lowry’s lithographs like St. Mary’s Church are produced by hand whereby a plate is etched and inked, and the paper is then pressed onto the plate to produce an original. Due to this printing process, no two prints are exactly the same and are therefore highly sought after.
