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Oil on canvas: 20 x 24 (in) / 50.8 x 61 (cm) Signed and dated lower right: L.S. LOWRY 1955

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LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY RA RBA LG NS

Manchester 1887 - 1976 Glossop

Ref: CB 160

Yachts, Lytham St Annes

Signed and dated lower right: L.S. LOWRY 1955

Oil on canvas: 20 x 24 in / 50.8 x 61 cm

Frame size: 29 x 33 in / 73.7 x 83.8 cm

Provenance :

Lefevre Gallery, London, directly from the artist [X7337];

The Rt Hon Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964), acquired from the above in 1956;

Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, Canada, gifted by the above in 1959 [1959.135 / 516]

Exhibited :

London, Lefevre Gallery, Recent Paintings by LS Lowry , March-April 1956, no.21

Literature :

Beaverbrook Art Gallery: Paintings , University of New Brunswick, Fredericton 1959, p.51, illus. pl.61

John Hadfield (ed.), The Shell Guide to England , Michael Joseph in association with Rainbird Reference Books, London, 1970, p.76, a detail illus. p.77

Lowry spent many childhood holidays with his parents at Lytham St Annes, a resort on the Lancashire coast, and began his career with images of the sea: ‘I used to draw little ships when I was eight,’ he recalled.[1] Mervyn Levy suggests the yachts at Lytham St Annes in particular haunted the artist’s imagination: ‘They re-appear over the years in dreamlike evocations of those long ago holidays; a touching tribute to his mother’s love of their old holiday resort.’[2] Throughout his artistic career Lowry regularly returned to the British coast for inspiration, as Richard Grossick relates, ‘observing it as a place of recreation and industry with people, promenades, promontories, docks, yachts, boats and ships. In 1938, shortly before his mother’s death, his relationship with the coastal landscape changed, stripped back to the bones, just sea and sky, a symbol of his more philosophical view of human existence.’ 

Lowry painted several scenes of Yachts at Lytham, marking his youthful fascination with the coast line of Lancashire and seaside locations across the country. In the present work, one of the

strongest and most successful, balancing a beautiful compositional arrangement with the masterful application of predominantly white paint, Lowry includes two figures in rowing boats to the right, which also feature in his earlier painting of 1912. The painting is perhaps most comparable in style, palette and technique to Yachts at Lytham or Sailing boats ,  1930, another significant picture in the oeuvre of the artist belonging to the Lowry Estate and currently on loan to Manchester City Art Gallery. This earlier picture featured in the recent film, Mrs Lowry and Son , and is believed to have been a favourite of the artist’s mother, hanging proudly on the wall of his home in Mottram until he died. The Estate collection also includes a sketch of what seems to be the same scene, which was most likely made before the motif.

We are grateful to Richard Grossick of The Estate of LS Lowry, for his assistance with the cataloguing of this work .

LS Lowry, Sands at Lytham , 1956                         LS Lowry, Yachts , 1959

Oil on canvas: 7 ¾ x 12 in                                  Watercolour on paper: 26 x 36.2 cm

Yale Centre for British Art                                  The Lowry, Salford

Note on provenance:

This exceptional work was recently deaccessioned from the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, Canada, to raise funds for future acquisitions. The Art Gallery was founded in 1959 by William Maxwell Aitken, 1st Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964), one of the most influential figures of the early twentieth century. Financier, politician, press baron, philanthropist, art collector and supporter, it was Lord Beaverbrook’s original gift of 300 art works that established the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, whose British collection is one of the most comprehensive in the world.

[1] The artist cited in Michael Howard, Lowry , A Visionary Artist , Lowry Press, Salford 2000, p.226.

[2] Mervyn Levy, ‘Introduction’, LS Lowry RA 1887–1976 , exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London 1976, p.9.

Other Works By Laurence Stephen Lowry:

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LS Lowry and the Sea at the Granary

In 2024, the Granary Gallery is taking a deep dive into LS Lowry’s (1887-1976) interest in seascapes, specifically of the North Sea, which he captured from the Northumberland coast over several decades. Visitors to Lowry and the Sea will have the opportunity to see 20 of his works, including oil paintings, as well as drawings in pastel, charcoal, and pencil, both from public and private collections. Loans are supported by the Weston Loan Programme with Art Fund. Created by the Garfield Weston Foundation and Art Fund, the Weston Loan Programme is the first ever UK-wide funding scheme to enable smaller and local authority museums to borrow works of art and artefacts from national collections. Although best known for his industrial paintings of Manchester and the surrounding area, LS Lowry began visiting the North East of England from the 1930s, with his first visit to Berwick-upon-Tweed around 1935. He became a regular visitor to the town until his death in 1976 capturing the town’s streets and buildings and views of the North Sea. Lowry was fascinated by the sea and had first been drawn to it as an art subject at just 8 years old and it had by now become increasingly important in his work Similar to his famed industrial works, he found an equally mysterious mood in the waves and winds, as he did in the smoke of Salford.

Lowry would capture the different vessels that he saw from the shore. In Yachts (1920, The Lowry Collection, Salford), they are dotted about under broken clouds, yet the view retains a calmness. A relaxed view of the sea continues with people strewn on the beach in Spittal Sands, Berwick (1960, Private Collection), while Waiting for the Tide (1965, Private Collection) conveys a ship peacefully floating in the distance.

But the spectre of industrialisation was still never far away. In Tanker (1965, The Lowry Collection, Salford) pollution appears to bleed into the murky green water and dirty sky. The dangers posed by seafaring are also captured, with Untitled (Sinking Ship) (undated, Estate of LS Lowry) rendering a capsized ship slowly hastening to the sea floor. The implicit peril caused by the wildness of the North Sea was a mood that Lowry returned to over the span of a half century, from the pastel-worked Stormy Seashore (1920, Estate of LS Lowry) to the painting Grey Sea (1970, Estate of LS Lowry). Lowry has been celebrated for his radical and idiosyncratic approach to art, as well as the use of stark monochrome, and the exhibition highlights this. In the pencil work At Anchor (1963, The Lowry Collection, Salford) a bold black wave dwarfs a ship that appears almost suspended in a sea of white, while The Sea (1969, The Lowry Collection, Salford) utilises only short lines of blue ballpoint pen. Other-worldly features are also depicted in his seascapes, where a gigantic rock juts out of the water in Untitled (Rock in the sea) (1970, Estate of LS Lowry). In a curious and atypical ´self-portrait´, LS Lowry depicts himself as a monolith-like shape in Self Portrait as a Pillar in the Sea (1966).

Lowry’s relationship with the sea seems to evolve further after the death of his mother in 1939. After a trip to Anglesey, in 1944 he was bored ‘almost to death’ and unable to paint anything. About a month later he was back at home and started to paint the sea – ‘the sea that I had seen, nothing but the sea. But a sea with no shore and no boat sailing on it – only the sea’, He continued to paint these ‘empty seascapes’ for the rest of his life and two significant works from the 1960s demonstrate this in the exhibition – Seascape (1965, Arts Council Collection) and The Sea (1963, Lowry Collection, Salford).

The artist once said, “I have been fond of the sea all my life, how wonderful it is, yet how terrible it is”, and the works on display give a clear indication of this idea – the wrestling of opposing feelings – sometimes within the same picture. This can be seen in A Rainbow (undated, Estate of LS Lowry) where the arch does not stand out through colour or gradient, but by its imposing status over the vast expanse of the water´s surface. It is both a typical symbol of tranquility at sea, as well as an indicator of terror, demonstrated by its sheer size. Many of the seascapes would be turned into limited-edition prints and become popular images of Britain´s coastline. Now, visitors to The Granary Gallery will have the opportunity to see up close the original sketches, drawings and paintings by LS Lowry in the place where he found so much inspiration over his decades-long celebrated career. James Lowther, Head of Visual Arts at the Maltings says ‘We are delighted to present this new exhibition of original works by LS Lowry at the Granary Gallery. Lowry had a great affection for Berwick-upon-Tweed, evidenced by the number of works he produced of the town. These works provide a fascinating starting point to explore Lowry’s lifelong fascination with the sea and I’m sure the exhibition will of great interest to local people and visitors from far afield.’ } Tickets for Lowry and the Sea (25th May- 30th October 2024) are available online on the Maltings website ( maltingsberwick.co.uk) , by telephone or by visiting The Box Office at The Maltings and the Granary Gallery. Tickets: £5, concessions will apply.

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The most original sea painter since Turner? Lowry

Atmospheric, surreal and ominous: an exhibition in berwick-upon-tweed shows a very different side to l.s. lowry.

• From magazine issue: 22 June 2024

Laura Gascoigne

Lowry and the Sea

Granary Gallery, Berwick-upon-Tweed, until 13 October

In 1958 an elderly gentleman staying at the Castle Hotel in Berwick-upon-Tweed gave the receptionist a doodle he had made on the hotel’s notepaper. She kept it in a box and 43 years later, on the advice of Antiques Roadshow , sold it at auction for £8,000.

‘I don’t think anyone since Turner has looked at the sea with such an original eye’

A contemporary photograph shows that gentleman in his trademark trilby, dark suit and tie – no casual wear for L.S. Lowry – standing on the pier with Berwick in the background. Lowry (1887-1976) is not best known for his paintings of the sea, but there are 21 – including the receptionist’s sketch – in this interesting little exhibition in the Northumbrian town which he regular visited, and they cast him in an unaccustomed light.

Lowry discovered Berwick in the mid-1930s while on a holiday prescribed by his doctor as a cure for exhaustion, but his love of the sea went back to family holidays on the Lancashire coast and days out with his mother to Lytham St Annes. A painting of ‘Sailing Yachts at Lytham’ (late 1930s) was in fact the only picture for which his mother, who disapproved of the industrial scenes that made her son’s reputation, ever expressed admiration.

Her disapproval did not deflect him from his chosen path. Lowry’s decision to paint industrial subjects was a calculated one – ‘Nobody has done this,’ he thought, ‘I’ll have a shot at it’ – and so was the naive style adopted. The Salford rent-collector was not a self-taught outsider artist; he had failed to get into Manchester’s Municipal College of Art aged 18 but spent the next 23 years attending night classes, where one of his tutors was the young Adolphe Valette, newly arrived from France.

‘I cannot overestimate the effect on me at the time of the coming into this drab city of [Adolphe] Valette, full of the French impressionists, aware of everything that was going on in Paris,’ Lowry recalled years later. Valette specialised in painting water and silhouetted figures. The figures re-emerged in his pupil’s industrial landscapes in a cartoon form owing as much to silent comedy as to painting, but the water called for a painterly approach of which he proved himself more than capable.

In ‘July, the Seaside’ (1943), a compendium of beach activities – swings, sandcastles, puppet shows, donkey rides – on a single canvas, the familiar painter of matchstick men is at work, observing families at play like a traveller from another planet whose only previous knowledge of humanity was through slapstick comedy. Surely that fat man stretched on his back with his hat beside him is W.C. Fields? And the spindly figures in ‘On the Sands, Berwick’ (1959) look liable to blow away in a gust of wind like Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr. Lowry is as deadpan as Keaton, and as tragicomic – he claimed to have ‘no happy memories’ of his childhood.

The seascapes are a different kettle of fish. The early pastel ‘Yachts’ (1920), under the influence of Valette, is as atmospheric as a Degas sketch of the Normandy coast and more experimental, trapping the haze of a muggy English day in its tangled mass of opalescent strokes. In the later oil painting ‘Spittal Sands, Berwick’ (1960), distant forms are frayed by the impasto as if viewed through eyes screwed up against the glare (see below).

In the 1960s Lowry began to visit Sunderland – which he claimed to like ‘because nobody else did’ – and paint the tanker traffic from his room at the Seaburn Hotel, much as Monet painted the tugboats from his suite at the Savoy. His techniques became increasingly innovative: the paint surface of ‘Five Ships’ (1960s) has been scratched with a sharp implement to add dazzle to the ripples.

After the loss of his mother in 1939, Lowry’s relationship with the sea changed. The watershed was a visit to Anglesey in 1944 during which, he told the art historian John Rothenstein: ‘I was bored to death… I could hardly look at anything. A month after I got home, I started to paint the sea, nothing but the sea. But a sea with no shore and nobody sailing on it – only the sea. Look at my seascapes, they don’t really exist you know, they are just an expression of my own loneliness.’ They are also rather ominous: the great sluggish mass of oncoming grey-green waves in ‘The Sea’ (1963) looks ready to spill over the frame into the gallery. He often wondered what would happen if ‘the tide didn’t turn and the sea came on and on and on and on and on… Awful, isn’t it?’

A surreal ‘Self-portrait as a Pillar in the Sea’ (1966) illustrates Lowry’s belief, in disagreement with Donne, that ‘every human creature is an island’. From his personal island he viewed the sea through a unique lens. ‘I don’t think anyone since Turner has looked at the sea with such an original eye,’ said his dealer Andras Kalman. On the evidence of this exhibition, he was right.

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Yachts at Lytham

Lowry and the Sea: 'intriguing' show explores 'enigmatic' seascapes

'Immaculately curated' exhibition features a series of paintings, pastels and drawings that show another side to the artist

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L.S. Lowry (1887-1976) will forever be associated with the "industrial cityscapes" he painted of his native Lancashire, said William Cook in The Critic . The artist spent most of his life in Pendlebury in Greater Manchester, where he was born, raised, worked as a rent collector – and produced his depictions of "dark satanic mills and smoking chimney stacks". But from the 1930s until his death, he spent his summer holidays in Berwick-upon-Tweed, an "unfashionable seaside town" far removed from the "bright lights" of resorts such as Blackpool. Here, "far from the stress and bustle of his daily life", he made a number of "enigmatic" seaside paintings that, unlike his urban scenes, were mostly "bereft of human life".

This exhibition features more than 20 paintings, pastels and drawings; it explores Lowry's connections to Berwick and his little-understood seascapes, revealing "an entirely different side" to his work. It's an "intriguing" show that tells us much about "the inner life of this introverted artist".

His "love of the sea" went back to family holidays on the Lancashire coast and days out with his mother to Lytham St Annes, said Laura Gascoigne in The Spectator : an early painting, "Yachts at Lytham" (which isn't in this show), was apparently the only picture for which his mother, who disapproved of her son's industrial scenes, "ever expressed admiration". This show begins on a jolly note: in "July, the Seaside" (1943), "the familiar painter of matchstick men is at work, observing families at play like a traveller from another planet", capturing "a compendium of beach activities – swings, sandcastles, puppet shows, donkey rides" with a deadpan comedy.

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Also charming is a "doodle" the artist scrawled on the notepaper of Berwick's Castle Hotel and gave to its receptionist. Most of his seascapes, however, "are a different kettle of fish": the "atmospheric" pastel "Yachts" (1920) conjures "the haze of a muggy English day" from a "tangled mass of opalescent strokes"; the impasto touches of 1960's "Spittal Sands, Berwick", meanwhile, suggest shapes in the distance "viewed through eyes screwed up against the glare".

After his mother's death, Lowry saw the sea as "a mirror to his loneliness", said Samuel Reilly in The Daily Telegraph . The ships that appear in his seascapes are "strangely crewless", less human creations than "elemental omens". Gradually, his palette is "pared back" to achieve an atmospheric effect not dissimilar to the haar, the thick sea fog seen on the northeast coast.

"The Sea", a particularly "astonishing" work of 1963, has the horizon "all but hazed out", the blue-grey crests of the waves threatening "to roll out" from the canvas and envelop the viewer. More peculiar still is 1966's "Self-Portrait as a Pillar in the Sea", in which Lowry depicts himself as "a single, inescapably phallic stack", buffeted by the waves, "a lonely, yearning man, claiming kinship with the sea". It's a highlight of a "small but immaculately curated" exhibition that is "as refreshing as a dunk in the North Sea".

Granary Gallery, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland. Until 13 October. Free entry

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L. S. Lowry 1920 - 1920

The lowry salford, united kingdom.

Like watercolour, pastel was a medium Lowry experimented with but rarely used - 'You can't get weight in pastels… Pastel is too fluid.'

• Title: Yachts
• Creator: LS Lowry
• Creator Lifespan: 1st November 1887 - 23rd February 1976
• Creator Nationality: British
• Creator Gender: Male
• Creator Death Place: Glossop
• Creator Birth Place: Stretford, Manchester
• Date: 1920 - 1920
• Physical Dimensions: w38.2 x h28.4 cms (without frame)
• Provenance: The Lowry Collection, Salford
• Type: drawing
• Rights: The Lowry Collection, Salford
• External Link: The Lowry
• Medium: Pastel on paper

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Lowry’s Most Important Works

Jasper Tordoff , Specialist [email protected]

Interested in buying or selling L S Lowry ?

The art of L. S. Lowry was deeply connected to his life. Born in 1887 in Stretford, Greater Manchester, the county’s surrounding factories, football stadiums and people would inspire his greatest paintings. Here we take a deep dive into seven works that tell the story of his life and times.

Read MyArtBroker's LS Lowry Investment Guide In 2024.

Read our   L. S. Lowry Market Watch   to discover Lowry's top 5 most investable prints.

Lowry grew up in a middle-class family in the leafy suburbs of Manchester. Financial troubles, however, forced him to drop out of school at 16 to find work. At the age of 18, he began to take evening classes in painting and drawing at the Manchester Municipal College of Art. His tutor was the French Impressionist painter Adolphe Valette, a master of city scenes. “I cannot overestimate his effect on me,” Lowry later said of Valette’s influence.

In 1909, the family moved to Pendlebury, an industrial area outside of Manchester. Lowry started working as a rent collector ­– a job he would hold for the next 40 years. He continued to paint in the evening after work, trying to find his artistic inspiration.

Sailing Boats, 1912

Made when Lowry was 25 years old, Sailing Boats is one of the artist’s earliest known paintings. The sharp sails, swirling clouds and hazy reflections in the water look more similar to the Impressionists than the painter Lowry would become (it is believed that Sailing Boats is the only work that Lowry’s critical and disapproving mother ever praised). Lowry later gave the painting to his aunt and uncle as a wedding gift in 1920.

In the 1960s and ’70s when he was an established artist, Lowry began to produce limited-edition prints for commercial sale. He chose around 54 of his most celebrated works – Sailing Boats was released in an edition of 850 signed copies in 1975, offering collectors the chance to own one of Lowry’s first works.

Coming from the Mill, 1930

Lowry’s artistic inspiration came in 1916 when a missed train at Pendlebury station set the course of his art.

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Over the next decades, Lowry painted this scene of little figures walking under a looming factory over and over again. One of the most famous is Coming from the Mill (1930), now in The Lowry Collection in Salford.

Street Scene With Mill (1959) , also called Mill Scene , is another archetypal mill picture. The original painting was last offered at Sotheby’s in London in May 2010 and remains in private hands. Lowry released the work as an edition of 3,000 in the 1970s – 750 signed copies and 2,250 unsigned – many of which are still on the market today. Other unsigned limited-edition mill pictures include Going To Work and Mill Town Scene .

Although clearly influenced by his surrounding mills and factories, Lowry was adamant that his scenes were imaginary. “I start on an empty canvas and prefer to paint from my mind’s eye,” he said in a BBC documentary from 1957, later adding, “it’s only a picture, it’s all make-believe, it’s not reality.”

Going to the Match, 1953

Lowry supported Manchester City football team all his life and often featured football matches in his paintings. Going to the Match is undoubtedly the best known. Painted in 1953, the scene depicts fans going to see a game at the Bolton Wanderers stadium. Lowry released Going To The Match as a signed lithograph, edition of 300, in 1972 – it is now consistently his most desirable and expensive print at auction, appealing to football fans and Lowry collectors alike.

The original painting was bought by the Professional Footballers’ Association in 1999 and has been on display at The Lowry Collection since 2000; it is one of the gallery’s most popular paintings.

Another of Lowry’s football paintings, The Football Match , sold for £5.6 million at Christie’s in London in May 2011, setting a new auction record for a work by Lowry.

Self Portrait, 1925

Painted when Lowry was 38 years old, Self Portrait is a rare, highly realistic work by the artist, displaying his skill at classical painting. Lowry was often dismissed by his critics as a hobbyist “Sunday painter” due to his naïve style. “I’m a Sunday painter every day of the week,” he shot back.

Fifteen years earlier, Lowry had made two similar portraits of his mother and father. The artist had a strained relationship with his parents. When his father died in 1932, Lowry became the sole caretaker of his sick, bedbound mother. The pressure he felt at the time was reflected in his art. “All the paintings of that period were done under stress and tension and they were all based on myself,” Lowry recalled.

In 1975, to mark his 88th birthday, Lowry released the three portraits of his family as a set of 300 limited-edition signed prints. The original paintings are now in The Lowry Collection .

Portrait of Ann, 1957

Lowry never married or had a girlfriend. His mother died in 1939, when Lowry was 52 years old, but he continued to live alone for the rest of his life. The artist channelled his fantasies of an ideal female companion into his portraits of Ann, an eternally youthful girl with braided black hair and dark eyes.

It is believed that Ann is a combination of teenage girls that Lowry mentored in later life and girls he saw in the streets. Lowry was also a fan and collector of Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s art, claiming “his women are very wonderful” – perhaps Lowry tried to channel Rossetti’s idealised portraits of his muses into his own work.

Beach Scene, 1946

Lowry once said that he “only deal with poverty; always with gloom. You’ll never see a joyous picture of mine”. But from the 1940s, particularly after the Second World War, his pictures became noticeably more light-hearted. Beach Scene from 1946 was one of many works depicting the jubilant post-war mood. Lowry would go on to paint more seaside escapes and also yachting pictures. “I’ve always been fond of the sea. How wonderful it is, yet also how terrible,” Lowry said in later life.

In the 1960s, Lowry branched out of painting and collaborated with London’s Ganymed Press to produce 16 signed limited-edition lithographs, each in a small run of 75, featuring images made exclusively for reproduction. These included beach scenes like Seaside Promenade , The Pavillion and Castle On The Sand , as well as views of daily life. The Ganymed lithographs are now among the most sought-after prints by Lowry collectors because of their rarity. The Tate collection holds 14 of Lowry’s 16 Ganymed lithographs.

Huddersfield, 1965

By 1970, Lowry had established himself as a household name – he was even offered a knighthood in 1968 (which he turned down). In 1976, a few months after Lowry’s death, the Royal Academy of Art in London held a major retrospective of his work. The exhibition attracted more visitors than any other show by a British artist.

Lowry had succeeded in his ambition to “put the industrial scene on the map”. While older artists like Julian Trevelyan and Christopher Nevinson had painted industrial landscapes before him, Lowry was right that none “had done it seriously”, to his level of dedication. His observations of daily life in overlooked towns like Pendlebury and Huddersfield won over collectors and galleries alike. His prints and paintings now regularly exceed their estimates at auction and many are in prestigious UK museums.

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Yachts At Lytham (1951) Fine Art Print

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Available in two sizes:

Approximate Size Small: Image Size (322 x 392mm) Paper Size (430 x 480mm) Large: Image Size (508 x 610mm) Paper Size (605 x 675mm)

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Sailing Boats, 1930

• Artist: L.S. Lowry
• Size: 52 x 60 cm
• Price: £145

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