Name: An Industrial Town
Brand: L S Lowry
Rating: 5 (236 reviews)

Track auction value trend

L S Lowry's An Industrial Town (signed) is a lithograph print from 1944, estimated to be worth between £1,600 and £2,450. Over the past five years, the hammer price has ranged from £800 in November 2022 to £4,200 in April 2021. This artwork has shown an average annual growth rate of -13% and has an auction history of 32 total sales since its entry to the market in March 2005. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 500.

Meaning & Analysis

An Industrial Town is a lithograph from 1994 by L. S. Lowry, that shows a busy city scene in the North-West of England, viewed from a high point in the city that looks over the vista. The print shows many features typical of Lowry’s work such as smoking chimneys, terraced houses and countless figures swarming through the streets and open spaces.

Lowry shows a great variety of people in his landscape, groups of young children, families pushing prams and elderly people in their winter coats, coming together to form a generalised impression of the industrial city. There is a lake depicted at the bottom right hand side of the print, showing people with their rowing boats out indicating that this is a scene of the public in their leisure time. Though not explicitly political, Lowry’s work is distinct in the way it shows images of working class people when they are not at work.

Elements of this print convey a sense of realism, but like many of Lowry’s works, this is a composite image. Lowry’s paintings were fundamentally composed from a variety of repeated motifs, growing increasingly sentimental as his career went on. The artist said, “I hadn’t the slightest idea of what I was going to put in the canvas when I started the picture, but it eventually came out as you see it. This is the way I like working best.”