His Family

Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. (1887-1976)
His Family, c. 1970-2
Offset lithograph on wove paper, after the original oil painting titled Family Group, 1955
Signed ‘L.S. Lowry’ lower right and numbered from the edition of 575 
Stamped by the Fine Art Trade Guild
Published by the Adam Collection Ltd.
Printed by Chorley & Pickersgill Ltd.
Size: 20¼ x 28 in. (51.5 x 71 cm.)

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This rather anecdotal catalogue entry for the 1966 Arts Council Retrospective Exhibition is a typically whimsical explanation by Lowry of what is in fact a most intriguing and unique painting. “The idea for this painting was based on a family which the artist saw waiting at a bus stop. He was struck by the fact that they all looked highly intelligent. The figure in the centre is the father, who is disappointed in his children."  The artist himself, sketchbook in pocket, can be identified on the far-right hand side. With his back to everyone he surreptitiously observes the family group over his right shoulder. Within the group there appear to be not one but two figures identifiable as Ann, the enigmatic character that Lowry frequently referred to in various guises, but no one in the artist’s life had actually met. It is very rare to see both the artist and the mythical creation of the artist's goddaughter in the same painting. 
In 1954, Lowry became fascinated in the Italian playwright, Luigi Pirandello's iconoclastic play Six Characters in Search of an Author. The arrangement of the figures in the foreground could almost be a direct staging of Pirandello's masterpiece, The play opened at the Arts Theatre Club, London on 23 June 1954 and transferred to the St James's Theatre on 20 July 1954. Lowry himself said of this play that it was “the only time in my life I have been strongly influenced by a play. I went to see it nine times.”  
The play is about the relationship between authors and their characters; fantasy and reality. Six characters interrupt the rehearsals of an ongoing play. The father of the group states that they are looking for an author to finish their story. The director, intrigued, allows them to tell their story of suicide, incest, and sibling murder. As the action, seen and unseen, unfolds, the fine line between reality and fantasy becomes ambiguous. What is real and what is acted is no longer clear. The play finishes with the Manager exclaiming 'Pretence? Reality? To hell with it all! Never in my life has such a thing happened to me. I've lost a whole day over these people, a whole day!' 
Lowry was fascinated by the idea of individuals waiting for their life to be 'directed' or 'written' and it has even been suggested by Shelley Rohde when referring to Ann that 'She was, like Pirandello's Six, a character in search of an artist.'  The Family Group in this work, suspended in flake white, is as much an absurd fantasy as a concrete reality. The story, half told about an intelligent family and a disappointed father needs to find an author to allow the characters to live.  'Oh sir, you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true'.