The darkness behind British artist LS Lowry’s well-known metropolis scenes

The ‘matchstick men’ association

Lowry hid behind a down-to-earth facade, but this unpretentious attitude may have led some to dismiss his work as unskilled. Asked about why his pictures were filled with so many matchstick figures, he said he would begin with just a few but, “for the sake of design,” by the end “you’ve got a picture full of people”. In the 1957 film, he insisted he didn’t mind that people called his figures matchstick men, but in later years, he came to resent this as a patronising way to look at a trained artist’s work.

Despite this, the idea struck a chord with the British record-buying public when two years after Lowry’s death, musical duo Brian and Michael’s tribute to the artist, Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs, topped the UK charts for three weeks. This sentimental one‑hit wonder, complete with children’s choir and key change, includes a lyrical twist, as the line “Now he takes his brush and he waits outside them factory gates” becomes “pearly gate” in the final chorus.

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In the same year that the BBC broadcast its short film, Lowry received a letter from 13-year-old Carol Ann Lowry who said that since they shared a surname, did he have any advice on how she could become an artist. He didn’t reply, but turned up unannounced at her Rochdale home a few months later. After her initial alarm at this strange man on her doorstep, she would become a sort of adoptive goddaughter. When he died in February 1976 aged 88, the unmarried artist left the bulk of his fortune to her.

A few months after his death, the Royal Academy staged a retrospective exhibition of his work to great acclaim. In the exhibition catalogue, Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman wrote that Lowry’s collected works would dispel any idea of him as “just another self-taught ‘primitive’ with a passion for industrial archaeology”. According to him, “All over his work broods a menacing melancholy. He is the painter of loneliness.”

While Lowry valued the recognition that his Royal Academy membership bestowed, he remained suspicious of the art establishment that it represented. The Queen tried to honour Lowry a record five times, including with an OBE in 1955, a CBE in 1961 and a knighthood in 1968, but he turned them all down. According to fellow artist Harold Riley, his friend told him that this was because he didn’t want to change how people saw him, not because he had “anything against the system”.