Name: Street Scene
Brand: L S Lowry
Rating: 5 (236 reviews)

Track auction value trend

L S Lowry's Street Scene (signed), a lithograph print from 1961, is estimated to be worth between £1,500 and £2,300. Over the past 12 months, the artwork has sold 6 times at an average selling price of £1,400. In the last five years, the hammer price has ranged from £1,000 in July 2023 to £5,500 in February 2023. The average annual growth rate of this work is -13%. This is a popular work with an auction history of 48 total sales since its entry to the market in March 2005. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 850.

Meaning & Analysis

L. S. Lowry’s print Street Scene from 1961 is a portrait composition showing a view of a street in an industrial inner city. This print is a vivid record of life in industrial northern England, marked by the smokestack at the top of the composition, with crowds of people walking up the hill towards the factory buildings in the backdrop.

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Visible in this print is Lowry’s stiff consistency in his choice of paint and the way in which he used it. Lowry painted with Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Colour throughout his entire career and used the paint straight from the tube. Using a very limited colour palette, Lowry said of his choice of materials, “I am a simple man, I use simple materials: ivory black, vermilion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre, flake white and no medium.” In Street Scene it becomes clear that Lowry’s unique painterly style worked to produce modest, yet vividly realistic industrial scenes.

In this print there are no shadows cast from Lowry’s highly stylised figures and along with the artist’s use of white paint for the ground and sky, this gives the impression that there is no sunlight in this scene. The lack of sunlight gives the scene a melancholy tone, as though the smoke from the mills have seeped into the atmosphere, characterised by what art historian John Rothenstein called ‘a kind of gloomy lyricism.’