WHEN the Royal Academy opened a memorial exhibition for Laurence Stephen Lowry in September 1976, six months after the artist’s death from pneumonia, the show broke attendance records with 150,000 visitors. Yet the sepia-tinted image of the impoverished Sunday painter of “matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs”, suspended in a 1930s Depression, persists. Separating the reality of Lowry’s life and career from the myth can be challenging.

“Lowry and the Sea” rises to this challenge by anchoring exhibits on one subject, and highlighting the artist’s connection to Berwick-upon-Tweed, where he first stayed in the mid-1930s and which he continued to visit throughout his life. Lowry initially came to the Northumbrian coast on doctor’s orders, as the strain of his late father’s debts, bedridden mother, full-time job as a rent collector, and painting for group exhibitions put him at risk of a breakdown.

July, The Seaside (1943), opens Lowry and the Sea with familiar urban figures transported to a beach, probably inspired by the north-west coast. Painted in wartime, the groups of figures are muted in their activity and dressed in subdued tones, except for strategic splashes of red for a woman or child’s top and girl’s dress to draw the eye around the composition.

© The Estate of LS Lowry. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2024L. S. Lowry, On the Sands, Berwick (1959)

At the extreme left of the plane, a couple in matching blue jackets and white trousers lie on their backs in the sand, limbs outstretched as if making sand angels. The sea occupies only top right, in a haze of blue grey circular brushstrokes, occasionally highlighted in white.

Lowry’s trademark schematic figures, with animals such as donkeys resembling Egyptian hieroglyphs, seen in July, The Seaside are not evident in the artist’s early work. Two pastel-on-paper works from 1920, Yachts and Stormy Seashore, show the influence of Lowry’s art tutor, Adolphe Valette. Studying with the French Impressionist in the early 1900s, Lowry was exposed to Valette’s admiration for Whistler and Monet, besides seeing Renoir and Degas during his school years in Manchester.

Both seascapes present a realist depiction of the sea meeting the horizon, the dark sails in Yachts and angular craft coming to land in Stormy Seashore offering conventional perspectival cues. In both works, nature and landscape dominate the scene through proportion and intensity of colour, while human activity is at the margins.

Ships featured throughout Lowry’s career. They represented his feelings about his own mortality, and symbolise feelings of life, death, and the afterlife. The sea, as subject, reflected his grief when his mother died in 1939, and a trip to Anglesey, five years later, marked a change in his painting practice. “I was bored almost to death. I couldn’t work, I could hardly even look at anything. A month after I got home I started to paint the sea, nothing but the sea. . . Look at my seascapes, they don’t really exist you know, they are just an expression of my own loneliness.”

© The Estate of LS Lowry. All Rights Reserved, DACS  2024. Image: © Arts Council Collection, Southbank CentreL. S. Lowry, July, the Seaside (1943)

Lowry’s paintings of churches and Whitsun parades showed his interest in Christianity, and his seascapes are spiritual meditations. Waiting for the Tide (1965) places a grey ship at the centre of the horizon between dark grey sea and slightly lighter sky. Painted in oil on board and highly varnished, the work has a ghostly quality. Rocks or pillars rising from the sea form a repeated theme in Lowry’s later seascapes, echoing his belief that “every human creature is an island.” In the undated Untitled (Sinking Ship), black felt tip adds permanence and solidity to a vertically upturned ship, surrounded by a flimsy flotilla of rescue craft.

In 1966, the artist painted four seascapes that he termed self-portraits. Self Portrait as a Pillar in the Sea contrasts a solid, dark image of masculinity with the traditionally feminine sea, a series of rapid, feathery brushstrokes. The artist described his autobiographical totems as “A tall straight pillar standing up in the middle of the sea, waiting for the sea of life to finish it off.” Hovering between redemptive Noah’s ark and all engulfing Armageddon, Lowry’s seascapes offer a porthole into a lesser-known side of his work.

“Lowry and the Sea” is at The Maltings, Eastern Lane, Berwick-upon-Tweed, until 13 October. Phone 01289 330 999. www.maltingsberwick.co.uk