Lowry's Love for Ladies with the Kiss of a Snake

LS Lowry's best-known pictures of grim northern townscapes and huddled masses of stick-like figures rushing from the mill or to the football ground make it hard to credit that he was a Pre-Raphaelite at heart.

And yet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown were Lowry's two favourite artists. Images of the Pre-Raphs' muses adorned the walls of his bedroom in his suburban home in Mottram on the outskirts of Manchester. He was president of the Rossetti Society.

"I said to my father: 'I wish you'd buy me a Rossetti painting.' Now I've got about 12,'' Lowry said late in life. "I'm a Victorian all right, you know."

Lowry and the Pre-Raphaelites, a free show at the Lowry in Salford, makes a stab at shedding more light on why these pictures meant so much to an artist whose own work was so very different. For us, it doesn't really succeed. Lowry was a very private man, and though we get to hear and read some of his own words, we're not really able to get far inside his head to explain his fascination with women like Jane Morris, perhaps the Pre-Raphaelite model par excellence.

Here she is by Rossetti, in a study for his painting Astarte Syriaca, depicting the ancient Syrian goddess of love. This wasn't actually a drawing that Lowry owned, though it's typical of the sort that he liked to buy. He maintained that not even the Old Masters could achieve the expression in the eyes that Rossetti could. "Isn't she wonderful?" said Lowry. "By God sir, but Rossetti could do it." But that didn't mean he was under Jane Morris's spell: "Can you imagine being kissed by that woman?" Lowry asked. "It would be like being kissed by a snake."

Lowry began buying Pre-Raphaelite art in the early 1950s, after he retired from his day job as a rent collector. He bought his only oil painting by Rossetti at an auction in 1964 for 5000 guineas, a price that marked a significant shift in the rise to popularity of the Pre-Raphs. It was again Jane Morris, this time as Proserpine, and represented in this show in another version of a work Rossetti painted eight times. Rossetti had an intense relationship with Jane, with the knowledge of her husband William Morris.

Those Pre-Raphs with their turbulent love lives and passions; such a contrast, it seems, with a man who lived with his mother until she died, when he was well over 50. He never married and never went abroad, even as he lived into his 80s and became famous. Perhaps that helps explain the attraction.

When Lowry was growing up, Manchester had one of the best public Pre-Raphaelite collections in the country, with many key works in the city's art gallery and murals by Ford Madox Brown in the Town Hall. A major exhibition of Pre-Raphs at the art gallery in 1911, with over 300 works, had a big impact on the young Mancunian, then in his early 20s.

Among his favourite paintings by Rossetti was The Bower Meadow, depicting another couple of famous Pre-Raph models, Marie Stillman and Alexa Wilding. It was a picture that Lowry longed hopelessly to own. In later life he would buy drawings of both.

Lowry speaks of these Rossetti women in an old TV clip that you can see in the exhibition. "Queer birds," he calls them. "I think they're ladies of the town myself, between you and I." Joli Coeur was another of Lowry's favourite pictures, but the model Ellen Smith strikes a rather more seductive pose than the other more enigmatic women he tended to prefer.

It's rather more difficult to grasp Lowry's liking for Ford Madox Brown from the pictures we get in this show. If you don't know Brown's terrific social-realist pictures Work and The Last of England, you may not be too impressed by his at times rather twee Town Hall murals. And this rather over-the-top painting was the one Lowry reckoned to be his best: Wilhelmus Conquistador, showing Harold's body being brought before William the Conqueror after the Battle of Hastings.

So what did Lowry include of the Pre-Raphs in his own work? Well, it seems to come down to Ann.

Lowry spoke to friends about his godchild, Ann, but her existence has never been confirmed. His view of Rossetti's women was that "they are not real women, they are dreams." Did that apply to Ann too? She stares enigmatically, if not moodily, into the distance. A bit like Jane Morris. 

There's an interesting idea behind this exhibition, but we felt it never really got very far into the questions it raises. There's nothing very much about Ann, and Lowry never actually seems to have painted in any particular pre-Raphaelite manner. Why is that? And while there are a number of paintings from Manchester Art Gallery on show, it's perhaps a bit unfortunate that Work and Astarte Syriaca have gone off to a show in Australia for the winter, rather than heading down the tram line to Salford. 

Practicalities 

Lowry and the Pre-Raphaelites is on at The Lowry at Salford Quays until February 24. Galleries are open daily from 1100 (1000 on Saturdays) to 1700. Admission is free. Trams run frequently from Piccadilly rail station and Piccadilly Gardens in central Manchester; get off at Harbour City and it's a few minutes' walk from there.  

For another major influence on Lowry

Manchester Art Gallery has a room dedicated to Lowry and his teacher Adolphe Valette. You can see clearly how Lowry gained inspiration from the French artist's foggy Mancunian town scenes and the solid figures that inhabit them. 

Images

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Study of Jane Morris for Astarte Syriaca, 1875, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © The Victoria and Albert Museum

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Proserpine, 1880. Private collection
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Bower Meadow, 1850-72, Manchester Art Gallery. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Joli Coeur, 1867, Manchester Art Gallery. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images

Ford Madox Brown, Wilhelmus Conquistador (The Body of Harold Brought Before William the Conqueror), 1844-61, Manchester Art Gallery. © Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images
LS Lowry, Portrait of Ann, 1957. © The Estate of L.S. Lowry. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2018