Ferry Boats L S Lowry

L.S. LOWRY, FERRY BOATS, SIGNED OFFSET LITHOGRAPH PRINTED IN COLOURS, EDITION OF 500, 1972

There were many important events around Lowry’s career during the execution of this painting in 1960; The Lowry Gallery opened in Salford in 1958, in 1959 Lowry had a second retrospective at Manchester Art Gallery and in 1962 he was made a full academician at the Royal Academy. Around all his fame, Lowry still worked as a rent collector and still lived with his mother. Lowry hated celebrity and was uninterested in the limelight. Looking at Ferry Boats it is easy to see that this was more inspired by the lives of others than the fortunes of himself. Lowry focuses on the crowd and composes the picture around the form of a mass of figures, in this instance boarding a ferry. There is some fondness in this picture which is missing from Lowry’s bleaker seascapes. “I’d like to live by the sea” Lowry told Liz O’Donnell, née Fitton in 1961. The punters are dressed colourfully, which is unusual in a Lowry painting and the jolly funnels and sailing ships betray an optimism rarely seen in other works of the period such as Sailing Boats. 

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ABOUT L.S. LOWRY

L.S. Lowry is a much-loved British painter known for pictures that capture urban life in industrial north west England, most notably during the 1920s. Born in 1887 in Stretford, Lancashire, Laurence Stephen Lowry later moved to Pendlebury near Manchester where he lived and worked for over 40 years. The area, which he at first detested, was covered in factories and cotton mills that Lowry would soon obsessively depict. His fascination with the industrial landscapes and the people that inhabited them was inspired by a missed train. Standing on the platform at Pendlebury station, Lowry would later write of the view of the Acme Spinning Company’s mill, saying “I watched this scene – which I’d look at many times without seeing – with rapture.”