“IT was very nice to see you there in Barnard Castle,” wrote the artist LS Lowry on October 27, 1961, to his friend who had become the deputy director of the Bowes Museum. “Every time I see the collection in your museum I like it better and better – I always find something fresh to my mind, in some way or other.”
This summer, Lowry – famed for his matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs – is back at the Bowes in a joint exhibition with his fellow painter Norman Cornish – famed for his scenes of the County Durham coalfield.
The two artists knew each other in life, formally referring to each other as Mr Lowry and Mr Cornish, and, between 1951 and 1967, exhibited together on six occasions. Mr Lowry bought two of Mr Cornish’s paintings while Mr Cornish did a little sketch of Mr Lowry to accompany a review in The Northern Echo.
“They were very different people,” says Norman’s son-in-law Mike Thornton. “Lowry never wanted to talk about art and Norman always did. They were contemporaries, they exhibited together, there was mutual respect, and one of Lowry’s biographers says Norman was the only artist he was jealous of.”
Both men drew inspiration from the northern industrial landscapes around them. Norman, of Spennymoor, started work as a miner when he was 14 and became a full time artist when he was 47, and he paints his scenes as an insider; Lowry, from Manchester, was 32 years older and was a rent collector all of his working life. He seems to paint his mill scenes as an outsider.
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It is those north west scenes that made him famous – he is said to be Britain’s most popular artist of the 20th Century – but he also travelled a lot to the North East.
He first came over in the mid 1930s to holiday in Berwick, a town he liked so much he considered buying a home there.
He enjoyed the journey over the Pennines, writing of Weardale how he was looking forward to a “scamper over those wonderful moors”, and he loved exploring the North East coast down to Newcastle.
“I’m particularly fond of watching large ships coming into harbour, or being brought down a river by tugs,” he said. “I love the Tyne for that reason. It’s a wonderful river.”
In 1958, he was commissioned by the Friends of Middlesbrough Art Gallery to produce a work for £50 and he came to stay in Stockton with The Northern Echo’s renowned art critic WE Johnson.
They searched for suitable scenes, alighting on St Hilda’s Church in Middlesbrough’s original riverside centre.
“For perhaps 20 minutes, he sketched busily, cheating a bit by bringing in the church from the left to improve the composition, and drawing in no figures at all – not even a Lowry dog,” recalled Johnson. “He closed his pad, pocketed his pencils, and said ‘that’s it’, and we caught a bus home.”
Lowry returned to Manchester to work up the scene, and add some matchstalk dogs, but the Friends became increasingly concerned about why his finished painting was taking so long. Johnson eventually went over the Pennines to collect it, still wet, direct from the easel – it seems Lowry had finished two versions of the scene but had already sold them, which was why the Friends’ painting was taking him so long. However, as St Hilda’s Church was demolished 10 years later, the Friends had acquired an iconic image of a lost part of Boro.
Then in 1960, Lowry discovered something that changed his life: Sunderland.
"One day I was travelling south from Tyneside and I realised that this was what I had always been looking for," he said.
He’d stopped for a late lunch at the Seaburn Hotel on the seafront and fell in love with the place.
“I like Sunderland because of the shipping and shipbuilding and the countryside at the back,” he said. “I like the sea. I sometimes escape to Sunderland. I get away from art and artists.”
He liked the industrial comings and goings of the river, and he liked the industrial dereliction as the Lambton Docks wound down. He liked that Sunderland hadn’t been touristified, that when the daytrippers left, he could have the beach to himself – Roker still had the air of a Victorian resort which reminded him of his childhood holidays in Lytham St Annes.
So he stayed regularly for the next 15 years, certainly for weeks, sometimes for months, at a time. Always in the Seaburn, which Vaux Breweries had built in 1937 as their flagship, and always where possible in Room 104 with its views over the sea to the ever-changing horizon where the water and the sky always melted into one.
He liked to dine – on cold roast beef – at the same table with seaviews in the restaurant, sketching on napkins, which he would give away to passers-by.
He produced many views of the docks at work, the ships, the piers and the people.
And he also produced seascapes, of white-topped waves rolling in, often with a solitary boat on them, but sometimes with nothing, only the many greys of the seas. In 2022, a large scale empty seascape, painted from the Seaburn in 1966 sold at Tennants in Leyburn for £1,070,381.
Lowry explored much of the North East, from Barnard Castle, where he weekended often once his friend from Salford had started work at the Bowes to Saltburn, where he stayed for a week in the Alexandra Hotel in 1965. He also visited Durham, where Memories 552 told how an unusual chimney caught his eye.
But it was the front at Sunderland that drew him in.
“I am very fond of the sea, how wonderful it is and yet how terrible it is,” he wrote. “I often think about what would happen if the sea changed its mind and didn’t turn the tide and it came on and on. That would be the end of it all.”
He was also drawn to the North East by the Stone Gallery in Newcastle, which was owned by Tilly and Mick Marshall who became his agents – just as they sold and promoted the work of Norman Cornish.
They helped bring the two artists together, putting on four joint exhibitions of their work in the 1960s, with Mr Lowry being moved enough by Mr Cornish’s painting of The Gantry to pay 30 guineas for it.
Although there was a big age gap between the two, and there was a difference in temperament, the artists’ shared themes of people and industry mean there was a kinship between them. Over time, their work has grown in importance because they chronicled a way of life, on either side of the Pennines, which has since disappeared.
So opening on Saturday, July 20, at the Bowes Museum is Kith and Kinship: Norman Cornish and LS Lowry, which runs until January 19, 2025. It features more than 50 paintings, drawings and sketchbooks by the two, most of which are either rarely or previously unseen publicly before.
- With thanks to Mike Thornton for his help
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