A woman had put away some drawings and frames in a cupboard for 20 years without thinking much of her stash. When she recently went back to the cupboard to check if she could reuse an old frame, she discovered two of LS Lowry’s signed and dated drawings on the back of the frame, and one in the cupboard.
The anonymous consignor of the works will be selling the drawings at Unique Auctions on the 23rd of October for £20,000 ($22,000) each. She had originally bought the works in the early 2000s from the estate of Mary Morgan Lloyd, a friend of Lowry who had worked as an art teacher at the Liverpool School of Art and in industrial design before the Second World War. For the last 20 years, the owner was unaware that the eclectic portfolio of art contained valuable Lowry sketches.
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The sketches, depicting rural scenes and villagers, were made by the artist Laurence Stephen Lowry RBA RA (1887-1976) between 1959 and 1961. Lowry is a frequent dweller of UK auction houses, with fantastic results achieved for his bigger and more topical pieces, and one painting going at Christie’s this October for an estimate of £5-8 million ($5.5-8.8 million). Born in Lancashire, Lowry is famous for depicting scenes of life in the industrial district of North England and his ‘matchstick’ men. His works are extremely popular in the UK and beyond, with a major retrospective dedicated to him at Tate Britain in 2013. Five times he was offered British honors, including an OBE, CBE and a knighthood, and rejected them all. The current record for his works is £5.6 million, achieved at auction in 2011 for The Football Match.
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“They have never been seen before. It is unusual to get three original undiscovered Lowry drawings to come to auction simultaneously”, Darryl Kirk, Head of Marketing at Unique Auctions told the Telegraph. “They are fresh to the market and we hope they will attract a lot of interest.”
