St Luke's Church

Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. (1887-1976)
St Luke’s Church, London, 1973
Offset lithograph on wove paper, after the original oil painting St Luke’s Church, Old Street, 1945 (Collection: Private Collection) 
Signed ‘L.S. Lowry’ lower right and numbered from the edition of 850 lower left in pencil
Published by G.R. Mellor (with the publisher’s blindstamp)
Size: 24½ x 19 in. (62 x 45.7 cm.)

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Known most prominently for his paintings depicting his native region of the Northwest of England, British artist L.S. Lowry also produced several London-based scenes. Lowry remarked in conversation with Edwin Mullins; “Until very recently I’ve been going to London a once a month for 50 years – I had an aunt there for a long time – but I did almost no work in London except for one of St Luke’s Church, Old Street. I’d been told it had the ugliest spire in the world. So naturally I had to go and look at it.”   The ‘ugly’ spire of St Luke’s church still stands today, yet the church’s surroundings only loosely resemble Lowry’s depiction. Instead, he invented a more idealised and simplified composition in order to draw heightened attention to the church and the church goers.
Although Lowry’s first solo exhibition in London did not take place until 1939, his work had been shown in the capital since the early 1920s through Daisy Jewell of James Bourlet & Sons – at the time not only London’s pre-eminent framers and shippers, but also exhibition organisers supreme and entertainers of the art world’s greatest collectors. At Jewell’s instigation, Lowry’s work had been included in exhibitions at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of British Artists and at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin. It was Jewell who also introduced Lowry’s work to A.J. McNeil Reid, of Alex. Reid and Lefevre Ltd, in King Street, St James’s, who having seen a painting that Jewell had deliberately propped up by a chair in her office, immediately offered to give Lowry a show. The success of this exhibition was a turning point in Lowry’s career, not only resulting in several sales to notable collectors, but also attracting a significant number of reviews in the press. As Lowry noted: ‘Looking back, I don’t know what I would have done, if I’d not had that show…’ . The Lefevre Gallery continued to represent Lowry when it re-opened after the War, giving him solo exhibitions every two years for the remainder of his life. In 1952 Andras Kalman gave Lowry a show in Manchester and was to continue to put on regular exhibitions when he moved to London’s Old Brompton Road in 1957. As a result, Lowry had not one, but two of London’s leading galleries representing him in his later years.