The most original sea painter since Turner? Lowry

In 1958 an elderly gentleman staying at the Castle Hotel in Berwick-upon-Tweed gave the receptionist a doodle he had made on the hotel’s notepaper. She kept it in a box and 43 years later, on the advice of Antiques Roadshow, sold it at auction for £8,000.

A contemporary photograph shows that gentleman in his trademark trilby, dark suit and tie – no casual wear for L.S. Lowry – standing on the pier with Berwick in the background. Lowry (1887-1976) is not best known for his paintings of the sea, but there are 21 – including the receptionist’s sketch – in this interesting little exhibition in the Northumbrian town which he regular visited, and they cast him in an unaccustomed light.

Lowry discovered Berwick in the mid-1930s while on a holiday prescribed by his doctor as a cure for exhaustion, but his love of the sea went back to family holidays on the Lancashire coast and days out with his mother to Lytham St Annes. A painting of ‘Sailing Yachts at Lytham’ (late 1930s) was in fact the only picture for which his mother, who disapproved of the industrial scenes that made her son’s reputation, ever expressed admiration.

Her disapproval did not deflect him from his chosen path. Lowry’s decision to paint industrial subjects was a calculated one – ‘Nobody has done this,’ he thought, ‘I’ll have a shot at it’ – and so was the naive style adopted. The Salford rent-collector was not a self-taught outsider artist; he had failed to get into Manchester’s Municipal College of Art aged 18 but spent the next 23 years attending night classes, where one of his tutors was the young Adolphe Valette, newly arrived from France.

‘I cannot overestimate the effect on me at the time of the coming into this drab city of [Adolphe] Valette, full of the French impressionists, aware of everything that was going on in Paris,’ Lowry recalled years later.