Woman With A Beard

Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. (1887-1976)
Woman with a Beard, 1975
Offset lithograph on wove paper, after the original painting Woman with a Beard, 1956 (Collection: Private collection)
Signed ‘L.S. Lowry’ lower right, guild stamped and numbered from the edition of 756
Size: 19 x 23 in. (48 x 58 cm)

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The present work is quite unlike the industrial landscapes for which L.S. Lowry is best known, yet in its muted colours and flattened depiction, Woman with a Beard is immediately recognisable as his work. The original painting was declared the “star lot” by the auctioneers at Christie’s for a London sale in June 2000, when part of the world’s largest Lowry collection, originally amassed by Monty Bloom, one of Lowry’s most avid collectors in his lifetime.
Lowry told Bloom directly how the painting came to be, describing how the woman sat opposite him on the train from Manchester to Paddington “had a very nice face and quite a long beard” . Well known as a master people-watcher, Lowry felt that he had to seize the opportunity, telling Bloom, “Well sir, I just couldn't let such an opportunity pass, so I began almost at once to make a little drawing of her on a piece of paper.”  The original sketch can be seen below.
He was promptly caught in the act, and deeply embarrassed: “After a while, she asked, rather nervously, what I was doing. I blushed like a Dublin Bay prawn and showed her my sketch - the one from which I later made my painting of her.”  She, as many would be, was slightly uncomfortable with the surprise of being drawn from life, but by the end of the journey, both parties were far more comfortable. Lowry told Bloom that “we talked and by the time the train had reached Paddington we were the best of friends. We even shook hands on the platform.”
Lowry was fascinated to meet “an able and intelligent woman, completely alone and isolated behind her deformity” . His preoccupation with loneliness and isolation preoccupies much of his work. Lowry was famously recluse, using the formality of “Sir” even for his closest friends. Indeed, he once wrote of his paintings that “All my people are lonely. Crowds are the most lonely thing of all.”
The artist was well known for his tall tales, and many doubted that the original painting was based on a true experience, but he clearly feels an affinity for his subject, real or imagined. He once remarked, when discussing his fascination with ‘grotesques’: I can’t say why I am fascinated by the odd, but I know I am… They are real people, sad people. I am attracted to sadness, and there are some very sad things. I feel like them.”  In this work, Lowry recognises his subject as fellow lonely individual, and their shared condition unites them, rather than divides them.