Critical Review
An Industrial Town is a lithograph from 1994 by L. S. Lowry, that shows a busy city scene in the North-West of England, viewed from a high point in the city that looks over the vista. The print shows many features typical of Lowry’s work such as smoking chimneys, terraced houses and countless figures swarming through the streets and open spaces.
Lowry shows a great variety of people in his landscape, groups of young children, families pushing prams and elderly people in their winter coats, coming together to form a generalised impression of the industrial city. There is a lake depicted at the bottom right hand side of the print, showing people with their rowing boats out indicating that this is a scene of the public in their leisure time. Though not explicitly political, Lowry’s work is distinct in the way it shows images of working class people when they are not at work.
Elements of this print convey a sense of realism, but like many of Lowry’s works, this is a composite image. Lowry’s paintings were fundamentally composed from a variety of repeated motifs, growing increasingly sentimental as his career went on. The artist said, “I hadn’t the slightest idea of what I was going to put in the canvas when I started the picture, but it eventually came out as you see it. This is the way I like working best.”
