Three Men And A Cat

Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. (1887-1976)
Three Men and a Cat, 1971
Offset lithograph on wove paper, after the original oil painting from 1963 of the same title (Collection: Private Collection)
Signed ‘L.S. Lowry’ lower right in blue biro
Stamped by the Fine Art Trade Guild and numbered from the edition of 850
Published by the Adam Collection Ltd.
Printed by Max Jaffe
Size: 9½ x 6½ in. (24.1 x 16.5 cm)

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During the 1950s and early 1960s, Lowry moved away from representing the crowd and towards images of single isolated figures or small dislocated groups of figures with individual identities. Unlike the unidentifiable characters that populate many of his early industrial scenes, here, the artist turns with close analytical observation to the people that inhabit them; people that he met or observed during his daily rounds as a rent collector in the city, many of whom were relegated to the fringes of society.
During this time Lowry's figures, in paintings such as Three Men and a Cat (1963), are positioned against a white void so that the subject of the work becomes the figures alone, or, more importantly, the subject becomes the empty spaces which separate them on the page.
The move from the crowd to the isolated figures of the 1960s was for Lowry a natural progression. Although many of Lowry’s artworks depict groups of figures together, the sense of togetherness is not what it appears. Lowry once remarked of the people he observed: “All those people in my pictures, they are all alone. They have got all their private sorrows, their own absorption. But they can't contact one another. We are all of us alone - cut off. All my people are lonely. Crowds are the most lonely thing of all. Everyone is a stranger to everyone else. You have only got to look at them to see that.”  This notion creates another dynamic to Lowry’s works and makes the viewer question what they originally perceived of these figures.
The present work’s composition is unusual for the artist, who often worked with more traditional landscape orientation canvases, and was of course better known for his industrial panoramas depicting the Northwest of England. Historian T.G. Rosenthal suggests that Lowry moved away from painting images of the industrial North and moved onto his figure studies precisely at the time that his panoramas began bringing him great wealth and notoriety. “The switch of emphasis, of subject-matter and the manner of painting [was] distinctly Lowry-ish… Lowry was nothing if not self-aware when it came to painting. In effect he was throwing down a massive, paint encrusted gauntlet and saying loudly and clearly, either love my work as it is and take me as I am or shove off.”