LS Lowry's Art: 'I Sensed an Enormous Inner Desolation'

The celebrated painter liked to call himself a simple man who created his work with simple materials. In 1957, he showed the BBC how he built up his pictures of industrial urban life from his imagination, and described the loneliness that informed them.

When Laurence Stephen Lowry died on 23 February 1976 at the age of 88, few people knew that he had led a double life as a full-time rent collector, even after his depictions of northern England's sooty industrial landscapes had made him one of Britain's most beloved artists. Success came to him late but he was determined not to let it change him, turning down a knighthood because he didn't want people to think he was too fancy. He left the bulk of his vast fortune to a young woman who, as a 13-year-old, had written to him asking for advice on becoming an artist.

In 1957, the BBC made a short documentary showing Lowry at his easel. In the film, he revealed his ways of working, his creative habits and why he painted his distinctive matchstick figures. "I see them like that so I paint them like that, that's all there is to it," he said. While he liked to describe himself as a simple man, the apparent naivety of his work was a mask that hid inner complexity and decades of deep artistic learning.

Lowry was aged 69 when the BBC film was shown, having retired from his day job five years earlier. Because he never made a profit from his paintings until he was 58, it's hardly surprising that he needed a steady income. His role involved trudging around the poorer areas of Salford and Manchester to pick up payments from tenants. These were the same pavements walked a century earlier by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, when the harsh industrial conditions helped shape their revolutionary ideas. Salford was also the Dirty Old Town of legend in Ewan MacColl's folk song made famous by the Dubliners and the Pogues.

But Lowry insisted he had no reason to focus on its gasworks walls and old canals, apart from there being "something about them that attracts me in the pictorial sense". He told the BBC: "I'm not a social reformer; I don't think there's any propaganda in my work. I just paint the scenes that I see." All he cared about was how to truthfully depict life in the shadows of England's austere factories, warehouses and mills.

- Author: Greg McKevitt, BBC