The darkness behind famous city scenes by British artist L. S. Lowry

Matchstick Men Association.

Lowry hid behind a modest façade, but this humble attitude may have led some to dismiss his work as unskilled. When asked why his pictures were filled with so many matchstick shapes, he said that he would start with just a few, but “for the sake of design” in the end “you have a picture full of people.” In the 1957 film, he insisted that he didn’t mind people calling his characters “matchstick men”, but in later years, he came to resent this as a condescending way of looking at the work of a trained artist.

Despite this, the idea struck a chord with the British record-buying public when, two years after Laurie’s death, Brian and Michael’s musical duo, Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs, topped the UK charts for three weeks. This emotional one-hit wonder, complete with children’s chorus and key change, includes a lyrical twist, as the line “Now he takes his brush and waits outside the factory gates” becomes a “pearly gate” in the final chorus.

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In the same year that the BBC broadcast her short film, Lowry received a letter from 13-year-old Carol Ann Lowry, in which she said that since they shared a surname, did he have any advice on how she could become an artist. He did not reply, but suddenly appeared at her home in Rochdale a few months later. After her initial alarm about this strange man on her doorstep, she becomes a kind of adopted daughter. When he died in February 1976 at the age of 88, the unmarried artist left the bulk of his fortune to her.

A few months after his death, the Royal Academy organized a retrospective of his work, which received great acclaim. In the exhibition catalogue, poet laureate Sir John Betjeman wrote that Lowry’s collected works would dispel any idea of ​​him as “just another self-taught primitive with a passion for industrial archaeology”. According to him, “Throughout his work there is a serious sadness. He is a painter of loneliness.”

While Lowry appreciated the recognition that his membership of the Royal Academy brought him, he remained skeptical of the artistic institution it represented. The Queen attempted to honor Lowry a record five times, including awarding him an OBE in 1955, an OBE in 1961, and a knighthood in 1968, but he refused all of these requests. According to fellow artist Harold Riley, his friend told him it was because he didn’t want to change people’s perception of him, not because he “had anything against the system.”