L. S. Lowry

Laurence Stephen Lowry was born in Stretford, near Manchester, to a clerk and a former piano teacher who never forgave the world, or her son, for not being what she had hoped. When money troubles forced the family to move to industrial Pendlebury in 1909, he hated it at first and then found he could not stop looking at the mills, the chimneys and the crowds moving between them.

In 1910 he took a job as a rent collector and clerk for a property company, and he kept it, walking the streets of Salford with a ledger, until he retired in 1952. He never told his colleagues he painted. Evening classes at art schools in Manchester and Salford went on for years, and a French teacher there, Adolphe Valette, showed him that the city could be a subject.

After his father died in 1932 his mother took to her bed and Lowry nursed her, alone, for seven years, painting after ten at night when she was asleep. She did not think much of the results. A London dealer stumbled on his work by chance in 1938, and his first solo exhibition opened at the Lefevre Gallery in 1939. He was 51. His mother died that October without seeing what her son had become.

He went on painting his crowds of matchstick figures for another thirty-five years, turned down a knighthood and four other honours, and died in 1976. A theatre and gallery in Salford now bear his name.