Mountain Lake, 1943

The 1930s and 1940s were difficult years for L.S. Lowry. Following the deaths of his father (1932) and his mother (1939) and the outbreak of World War II, the artist began to suffer from frequent depression and health problems. Predictably, these circumstances affected the style and subjects of his paintings. Lowry partially abandoned the bustling industrial and urban scenes that had earned him a fast growing reputation amongst collectors and the wider public. Instead, he began to paint bleak, empty scenes – the ‘lonely landscapes’, as he called them – whose atmosphere and character contrast greatly with those of his previous output.

This painting is one of the earliest examples of lonely landscape. Painted on composition board, probably because of the shortage of art materials during the war, Mountain Lake shares with other landscapes from that period a new interest in the use of light and colour. The paint is applied in thick layers and creates very subtle tonal modulations between green, dark blue and black. This aspect of the work must have been of particular significance to Jim Ede; its placement near a bowl by Lucie Rie, with remarkably similar visual pattern, highlights his taste for the play of light and dark and the refined juxtaposition of objects. The unusual character of this painting and its position make it one of the more surprising pieces at Kettle’s Yard.

The location of the landscape depicted is unknown. The work may have been inspired by the countryside of the Peak District and Cumbria, which Lowry visited and sketched often. However, comparison with a painting in which a similarly bird-shaped lake is set in a rather different landscape (Lake Landscape, 1950, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester) suggests that this is in fact an imaginary view.

Provenance: purchased by H.S. Ede from the Grosvenor Galleries, London, June 1969.