When Manchester artist LS Lowry sold Going to the Mill he threw in another painting as he feared the £10 he was charging was too expensive. The work is now due to auction with a £1-million estimate.
Lowry sold the picture to the literary editor of the Manchester Guardian in 1926.
The £10 he took was worth a lot more than that amount today, probably just over £500.
Lowry in his studio. He was a late starter as an artist and a prolific worker.
Lowry wrote to Wallace, saying: “I think I’ve charged you too much. Can I give you another one as well?”
Today, Lowry is among the most collectible of British artists and certainly one of the most recognisable.
His rather naïve pictures of everyday northern life are famed for the “matchstick” figures that populate them.
The painting is being sold by Mall Galleries. Critic Simon Hucker told the BBC that it represented the period when Lowry found his “unique voice.”
It was painted in 1925 just as the artist completed a largely self-financed and directed adult education in art.
Lowry wasn’t to be considered a major British painter until around a decade after this in the 1930s, by which time the artist was already in his 50s.
Now, his works are highly valued, with 23 in the national collection of modern art at the Tate Gallery.
Lowry was a prolific worker, who produced around 1,000 paintings. As well as scenes around Greater Manchester and the mill towns he also produced a good deal of work around Sunderland, where he holidayed on the coast and painted wherever he went.
Going to the Match by Lowry, 1953, his scenes of large, moving crowds helped capture the birth of football as a mass entertainment in north-west England.
Among his most valuable works are 1938’s A Cricket Match that made £1.2 million in 2019; Good Friday, Daisy Nook, painted in 1947, and sold in 2007 for £3.8 million, and Going to the Match. A 1953 entry in a long series, that sold for £7.8 million in 2022.
Lowry had initially priced this work at £30 at a Manchester exhibition before apparently accepting £10 and then adding a second picture as a makeweight.
It is being sold by Mr Wallace’s family and has an estimate of £700,000 to £1 million.
