People Standing About

Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. (1887-1976)
People Standing About, 1972
Offset lithograph on wove paper, after the original watercolour from 1955 (Collection: Private Collection)
Signed ‘L.S. Lowry’ lower right in pencil and numbered from the edition of 500 
Stamped by the Fine Art Trade Guild
Published by Penrose Fine Arts
Size: 13½ x 19½ in. (34.5 x 49.5 cm.)

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Detailed watercolour scenes by L.S. Lowry seldom appear on the open market, even less so those depicting what we have come to regard as the archetypal Lowry scene; figures scurrying about their daily business, gentleman in bowler hats, and the ever-present dogs that Lowry cherished and so often included in his compositions. Here, Lowry is celebrating the ordinary, creating a cast of individual figures with distinctive characteristics and a timeless appeal. It is exemplary of his fascination with individual characters that inspired one critic to describe him as an entomologist, “stalking human insects with his butterfly net... Lowry has become a collector of people.” 
Lowry was obsessively drawn to watching people going about their daily business. Spotting a group of people ‘just standing about’ was one of his everyday joys. Indeed, as Sir Ian McKellen so eloquently explained: “until Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, nobody seems to have noticed that much of human life is to do with waiting, and until Lowry painted his crowds, no other artist had recorded how people (and animals) look and behave en masse. Each individual is on his/her own journey across the canvas yet leaning to form the crowd with its own collective identity. Once you have seen how Lowry saw us, you cannot ever see or be in a football crowd, nor watch kids playing, workers leaving the factory, queuing, or stopping to chat or hear the fairground barker, without saying, “Lowry! It’s just like a Lowry painting!” Going about our business or pleasure, we are all subjects of his vision.” 
More than just the individual figure fascinated Lowry, but also the concept of the crowd and the nature of their isolation. Historian Howard Jacobson writes with a typical clear-sightedness about Lowry’s attitude to crowds: “For the most part these matchstick figures hurry off the canvas, the forward slope of their bodies suggesting not just dejection, but a sort of propulsion disconnected to their wills… they are a crowd, a cluster, a congregation, viewed by someone who is not them – not contemptuously or satirically, but from somewhere they are not – figures of loneliness themselves… and that’s their subject… their mystery”. 
It is believed the artist painted approximately only a dozen complete watercolours, rarely exploring the medium as he found it dried too rapidly to allow the reworking that he employed so successfully in his drawings. He seems to have experimented more frequently with them in the late 1950s, mostly portraying his familiar groups of people, as in the present work. This work is of particular importance, as it was one of very few examples where an example of his watercolour painting was produced as an offset lithograph (with Penrose Fine Arts in 1972).
Donald Rayner, the original owner of the present work, was a close friend of Lowry and fellow member of the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts. Rayner and Lowry often lunched together, and then return back to Rayner’s home in Marple for afternoon tea. As a gesture of friendship and as a token of his appreciation on these occasions, Lowry would often sketch pencil drawings for Rayner during their time together. On this this particular occasion in 1955, however, he used Donald’s watercolours in his attic studio to paint this work.