Northern England's gritty reality comes to life in the paintings of Laurence Lowry.
On the ground floor of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery there is a small painting on display by the English artist L. S. Lowry.
Lancashire Industrial Scene was painted in 1928 and bought for the gallery's art collection in 1957 by the DPAG Society, which operated the gallery at the time.
Laurence Lowry spent most of his life living and working in Manchester.
Moving around the city as a rent collector by day, Lowry would draw and paint in the evenings, almost always depicting sights of industrial parts of the city or nearby industrial towns.
As a young man Lowry was forced to move with his family across town from the relatively affluent and leafy south Manchester to a more working-class area.
Initially he disliked his new environment, but in time he grew fascinated by the grittiness of it all, the industrial architecture of the docks and factories with their smoky chimneys, the terraced houses and, as we see in much of his work, the people who lived and worked in them.
Initially captivated by French impressionist painting as a young man, Lowry developed his own particular style, after completing his after-hours art studies in the mid-1920s, perhaps influenced by the notoriously gloomy northern English weather and the distinct and diffuse light you get in that cloudy part of the world.
While Lowry became recognised as an important artist by the time he was in his 50s, he did not retire from his day job until his 65th birthday in order to paint full time.
Several years earlier he had painted Going to the football match, a work bought for just under £2million by the British Professional Footballers Association in 1999.
An art museum dedicated to showing the work of L. S. Lowry - The Lowry - opened in the dockland area of Manchester in 2000.
Lancashire Industrial Scene is one of many internationally significant paintings held in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery collection.
