Industrial Landscape by L.S. Lowry. 1955. Lowry lived in Manchester, where he worked as a rent collector. His painting was done mainly at night after he finished work.

David Blayney-Brown

'It's a largely imaginary scene, there are real elements in it in the distance on the left is the Stockport viaduct which is the vast railway bridge that fascinated Lowry, it appeared in a number of his pictures, it’s very obvious here. But most of the other aspects of the picture are either imaginary or they’re taken from different areas around Manchester and Salford and put together.

I think on the whole he painted it quite affectionately, many of his pictures, of course, have crowds of people, they’re going to and from work, they’re milling around in the streets. He doesn’t paint it as a particularly alienating landscape, but I think in this picture there is a sense of something more disturbing. It’s interesting that in the foreground he has painted a row of houses and a few people, but what one has the sense of, I think, is of a community rather clinging on in a rather empty and troubling place.

Lowry called it ‘Industrial Landscape’ so we are invited to read the picture as a landscape even though it is completely urban. If we read it as a landscape of course, we’re more than anything else aware of parody, the chimneys perhaps ape the trees of a forest, the smoke that hangs over them rising from the single tower of the chimney perhaps suggests the form of a tree itself above it’s trunk, the rivers have been channelled to power the mills, so it’s an ironic take on the idea of landscape and it focuses our minds on how nature itself, the real, the pure landscape was obliterated during the industrial revolution and becomes almost a perversion of real nature and perhaps of truth and beauty too.’