The BBC’s short film adopted what has since become a familiar approach, blending Lowry’s own voiceover with scenes of him at work. The footage was shot in Lowry’s clock‑filled house in a leafy village near Manchester where he lived alone. Producer John Read later recalled: “In spite of his awkward figure, he had the dignity and the bearing of a gentleman. But when I saw him sitting in this room, staring into the fire… I sensed an enormous inner desolation in the man.” An eternal observer of life, Lowry’s work captured the melancholy of large crowds. “I’m bound to reflect myself in the figures – I’m a very lonely sort of person,” he told the BBC.
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”.
Although he struggled to sell his paintings for years, they now fetch millions at auction. In 2024, Sunday Afternoon, a painting that he completed in the same year the BBC broadcast its short film, was sold for almost £6.3m ($8.5m). His 1953 painting Going to the Match went for even more, selling for £7.8m ($10.5m) two years earlier.
In 2000, the opening in Salford of the Lowry Centre confirmed his status as one of the city’s favourite sons. Built as part of a project to renovate the old canal, the sleek £106m theatre and gallery complex has become one of the most visited attractions in the area. Today, Manchester and Salford bear little resemblance to the world LS Lowry once captured, yet the poetry he found in what he called the everyday “battle of life” continues to resonate with people.
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