{"id":210043,"date":"2025-10-19T01:54:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-19T01:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/210043\/"},"modified":"2025-10-19T01:54:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T01:54:13","slug":"going-to-the-match-and-bourton-on-the-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/210043\/","title":{"rendered":"Going to the Match and Bourton-on-the-Water"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018My ambition,\u2019 Lowry once said, \u2018was to put the industrial scene on the map, because nobody [before] had done it seriously.\u2019 For Lowry, that scene specifically meant the urban landscape of Lancashire in north-west England, which he inhabited his entire life: one synonymous with terraced houses, mills and factories. In many celebrated paintings \u2014 for example, Going to Work<\/a> \u2014 he captured workers pouring in and out of such factories.<\/p>\n

The typical working week lasted five-and-a-half days, ending at noon on Saturday. After an hour or so\u2019s refreshment in the pub, the workers headed to watch a sports match (football or rugby league in the winter, cricket in the summer). In Lowry\u2019s part of England, sports stadiums were commonly found close to industrial buildings \u2014 and such is the case in Going to the Match.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clearly a windy day: the aforementioned red flag is blowing hard, as is black smoke from the chimney stack above the large mill. The wind blows into the faces of the match-goers, but they press forward unflinchingly regardless. Lowry conveys the allure that the game has for these people, and the communal sense of purpose it gives them at the end of a hard week at work.<\/p>\n

In sporting crowds the artist found a subject that would engage him across most of his career. Interestingly, however, Going to the Match is one of only two known paintings he did of a crowd for a rugby league game. He painted the other, a smaller work entitled Coming from the Match<\/a>, in 1959.<\/p>\n

Whether the context was professional or recreational, Lowry was a master at capturing people moving en masse. In the picture coming to auction, all the men are capped, some with their hands in their jacket pockets. One walks with a stick, one beckons a friend, and another has a cigarette in his mouth.<\/p>\n

A boy in shorts hurries along at the rear, presumably keen to catch up with an adult family member who will buy him his ticket to the match.<\/p>\n

Bourton-on-the-Water (1947)<\/p>\n

Two years after painting Going to the Match, Lowry was commissioned to provide the illustrations for a book written by his friend Harold Timperley and published by Jonathan Cape. A Cotswold Book was a guide to the affluent Cotswolds area of southern England. Lowry produced 12 drawings for it, depicting local places of interest.<\/p>\n

He was enchanted, among other things, by the honey-coloured stone of the buildings \u2014 so much so that he returned to the area in the late 1940s for what he called several \u2018very good\u2019 visits. \u2018The villages are\u2026 quaint,\u2019 he wrote in a letter at that time to fellow artist David Carr<\/a>. \u2018The buildings are mostly of stone, [which] is very warm \u2014 I noticed that at once, as quite different from the stone in Lancashire\u2026 which is cold and hard and bleak.\u2019<\/p>\n

He produced five known oil paintings on these visits \u2014 one of which, Stow-on-the-Wold<\/a>, was sold at Christie\u2019s in London in 2011.<\/p>\n

Another, Bourton-on-the-Water<\/a>, features in the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale on 22 October. It captures the eponymous Cotswolds village, widely regarded as one of the most picturesque in Britain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018My ambition,\u2019 Lowry once said, \u2018was to put the industrial scene on the map, because nobody [before] had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,90481,90483,90482,2918,1120,96,90480,90485,90479,90486,90484,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-210043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-bourton-on-the-water","tag-british-art","tag-christies-auction","tag-cotswolds","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-going-to-the-match","tag-industrial-scenes","tag-l-s-lowry","tag-modern-british-and-irish-art","tag-sporting-crowd","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}