Lot 1965
‡AFTER LAURENCE STEPHEN LOWRY, RA (1887-1976)
WOMAN WITH A BEARD (1957)
Offset lithograph, publsihed by the Adam Collection, 1975, edition of 750, with the FATG blindstamp, signed in pencil
58 x 47.5cm.
* On a journey from Cardiff to Paddington in 1957, Lowry saw this woman join the train at Newport and later recalled, "She had a very nice face and quite a long beard. Well sir, I just couldn't let such an opportunity pass, so I began almost at once to make a little drawing of her on a piece of paper. She was sitting right opposite me. After a while, she asked, rather nervously, what I was doing. I blushed like a Dublin Bay prawn and showed her my sketch - the one from which I later made my painting of her." With compassion and a sense of empathy, Lowry commented that she was "an able and intelligent woman, completely alone and isolated behind her deformity."
In Mervyn Levy's The Paintings of L. S. Lowry (London, 1975), the author picks up on the idea of alienation and comments that this "is a succinct example of the artist's power to express the terrible isolation of the individual soul, an isolation unquestioned and blithely accepted."
