L. S. Lowry’s print Street Scene from 1961 is a portrait composition showing a view of a street in an industrial inner city. This print is a vivid record of life in industrial northern England, marked by the smokestack at the top of the composition, with crowds of people walking up the hill towards the factory buildings in the backdrop.

Visible in this print is Lowry’s stiff consistency in his choice of paint and the way in which he used it. Lowry painted with Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Colour throughout his entire career and used the paint straight from the tube. Using a very limited colour palette, Lowry said of his choice of materials, “I am a simple man, I use simple materials: ivory black, vermilion, Prussian blue, yellow ochre, flake white and no medium.” In Street Scene it becomes clear that Lowry’s unique painterly style worked to produce modest, yet vividly realistic industrial scenes.

In this print there are no shadows cast from Lowry’s highly stylised figures and along with the artist’s use of white paint for the ground and sky, this gives the impression that there is no sunlight in this scene. The lack of sunlight gives the scene a melancholy tone, as though the smoke from the mills have seeped into the atmosphere, characterised by what art historian John Rothenstein called ‘a kind of gloomy lyricism.’