Going to the Mill—a rare early canvas by L.S. Lowry—surfaced from near-century-long obscurity and has realised £805,200 (with fees) in Lyon & Turnbull’s Modern Made sale. It marks the latest chapter in the painting’s history, having remained in the hands of the Wallace family since 1926 when it was acquired directly from the artist for £10.
Painted during the 1920s, Going to the Mill captures Lowry’s emerging voice as a chronicler of industrial life—before the stylisation hardened into cliché, “matchstick men” became a cultural shorthand. The work was initially sold to Arthur S. Wallace, then The Manchester Guardian’s literary editor, who included three of Lowry’s works in the paper’s special Manchester Civic Week supplement. The event, ostensibly a celebration of the city’s industrial achievements, also aimed—less openly—to quell unrest among Manchester’s working class.
Lowry, ever attuned to the poetics of the overlooked, found fertile ground in the grit and soot of that environment. Displayed in Lewis’s department store during Civic Week, passersby largely ignored his paintings. But Wallace saw something: a city stripped bare and rendered beautiful through its bleakness. He purchased Going to the Mill—Lowry marked the back at £30, though Wallace paid just a third of that—and struck up a lasting friendship with the artist.
Lowry expressed his gratitude in a letter dated 9 November 1926: “Many thanks for your letter and cheque of £10. I am happy Mrs Wallace likes the picture Going to Work and ask you to please accept The Manufacturing Town as a souvenir of the Civic Week.” That second work, sold years later with Lowry’s blessing, now resides in the Science Museum. Going to the Mill, however, remained with the family, on a long-term loan to Pallant House Gallery—until now.
In Going to the Mill, one sees a young Lowry balancing on the threshold of his mature language. The painting’s darkened palette and hazy atmosphere speak to the influence of his mentor, Alphonse Valette, who had been drawn to Manchester’s poetic grime. The heavy sky and smoke-blackened architecture are not simply background but condition, mood, and material fact.
At first glance, the composition reads as a collective movement toward the mill gates. But linger longer, and individual narratives begin to surface: a lone woman catches the viewer’s gaze, a figure in the crowd steps away, and one man, portfolio in hand, might even be a spectral stand-in for Lowry himself. These are not just figures; they are lives observed with aching clarity.
Far from a naive primitive, Lowry reveals himself as a Modernist painter, paring back form to heighten emotional resonance. The rhythmic sway of bodies and careful knee or elbow tension shows a painter completely controlling his means. Think Seurat by way of Lancashire but with the psychic charge of Van Gogh. It’s no accident that Lowry showed in the Paris Salon during the 1930s or that art historian T.J. Clark, long considered the preeminent voice on French modernism, chose to frame Lowry’s 2014 Tate retrospective within the lineage of the great “painters of modern life.”
L.S. Lowry: The Reluctant Modernist Who Painted Britain’s working class
Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887–1976) was an artist of contradictions: a rent collector by day and painter of post-industrial poetry by night. Born in Stretford, raised in Salford, and tethered for life to the grey skies of Greater Manchester, Lowry forged a visual language uniquely his own—part observation, part apparition.
Often misunderstood as a provincial outsider, Lowry was in fact a deeply engaged chronicler of modern life. His bleak, teeming streets and ghostly mills—rendered in pared-back palettes and populated by his now-iconic “matchstick” figures—form a visual record of Britain’s changing social landscape during the early and mid-20th century. What some once dismissed as naïve or parochial is now recognised for its emotional precision and conceptual clarity.
Trained under French Impressionist émigré Adolphe Valette, Lowry absorbed techniques of atmosphere and urban romanticism but cast them through the prism of English working-class life. He exhibited regularly from the 1920s onwards, quietly gaining a devoted following. Yet critical acceptance was slow. It wasn’t until late in life that he was fully embraced by the art establishment—appointed a Royal Academician in 1962, and offered but pointedly refusing a knighthood more than once.
Lowry’s work is held in major collections, including Tate and the eponymous Lowry Centre in Salford. But beyond the institutions.