Image: L. S. Lowry, Girl with white socks, 1960. Oil on board, 22.3 x 17.8 cm
Baldwin, the London art dealer, has devoted the October edition of its "On View" series to a small painting by L. S. Lowry, "Girl with White Socks", from 1960. The oil on board measures about 22 by 18 centimetres and is signed and dated "LS LOWRY. 1960" at lower right.
The painting belongs to a strand of Lowry's work that is less familiar than the crowded mill towns and streets for which he is best known: paintings of solitary figures. In its presentation, Baldwin argues that these works shift the emphasis from collective activity to individual presence, so that the people who populate his urban scenes become subjects worth looking at in their own right.
The title singles out an everyday detail of clothing. According to the gallery, this gives the figure a degree of familiarity while leaving her story unknown, creating a tension between precise observation and the anonymity of the sitter. The viewer is offered something to recognise but very little from which to construct a narrative, and the picture holds attention without an elaborate setting or a dramatic event.
Laurence Stephen Lowry was born in Stretford, Lancashire, in 1887 and died in 1976. He studied at the Manchester Municipal College of Art and at Salford School of Art while working as a clerk and rent collector, and his experience of the industrial North West shaped an idiom grounded in observation and developed through imagination. Across landscapes, portraits and figure studies, he kept returning to the relationship between people and the places they inhabit, and the gallery presents "Girl with White Socks" as a more intimate view of that lasting concern.
