Laurence Stephen Lowry R.A., (British, 1887-1976)

Rounders 38.3 x 50.8 cm. (15 1/8 x 20 in.)

Rounders
signed and dated 'L.S. Lowry 1939' (lower right)
oil on panel
38.3 x 50.8 cm. (15 1/8 x 20 in.)

Provenance
With Lefevre Gallery, London
With The Leicester Galleries, London, where acquired by
Dr. Llewellyn Wyn Griffiths C.B.E.
His sale; Sotheby's, London, 21 November 1973, lot 143
Sale; Christie's, London, 17 October 1980, lot 124
Sale; Christie's, London, 21 November 1995, lot 240
Sale; Christie's, London, 10 June 2005, lot 85, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
Sunderland, Art Gallery, L.S. Lowry, organised by Arts Council of Great Britain, August-September 1966, cat.no.28; this exhibition travelled to Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery, September-October, Bristol, City Art Gallery, October-November and London, Tate Gallery, November 1966-January 1967
London, Richard Green, L.S. Lowry, A Collector's Choice, May 2004, cat.no.5

Literature
Shelley Rohde, L.S. Lowry: A Life, Haus Publishing Ltd., London, 2007, p.165 (col.ill.)
T.G. Rosenthal, L.S. Lowry: The Art and The Artist, Unicorn Press, Norwich, 2010, p.77 (col.ill)

L.S. Lowry was a keen observer of sporting events including football and cricket matches. Among his most celebrated paintings is Going to the Match (1953) now in the collection of The Professional Footballers' Association. But rather than depicting the action on the field, the artist concentrates on the assembling crowd, converging on the stadium. In another acclaimed painting, The Football Match (1949), the game itself, albeit an amateur non-league one, forms the focal point surrounded by a decent-sized crowd contained within an extensive urban setting. Whilst football held more of a personal draw to Lowry, cricket matches also appear in a small selection of his paintings. Lowry's good friend and collector Alick Leggat, who was for many years Honorary Treasurer of the Lancashire County Cricket Club, provided advice for some of these on the positioning of the fielders. Like his football paintings, they portray both professional games, as in The Cricket Match; A Cricket Sight Board (1964-69) and more informal matches played out before a smaller crowd within an industrial environment, such as A Cricket Match (1952). In others, namely his 1938 oil on canvas, A Cricket Match, children can be seen playing the sport in an impromptu game amongst friends. The setting is quite typical with the action taking place on a piece of waste ground, framed by crumbling walls and broken fences.

With his engaging and playful 1939 painting Rounders, Lowry presents another very popular bat-and ball-sport, albeit one which never gained traction in the professional sense. Dating back to Tudor times and first referenced in 1744 (as base-ball), the rules of the game were included in William Clarke's 1828 second edition of The Boy's Own Book. Just as popular in Ireland as it was England, the Gaelic Athletic Association formalised and unified the rules in 1884. Shortly thereafter, associations were formed in the north-west (Liverpool) and Scotland. The rules are relatively simple, compared to say cricket or American baseball. The bowler pitches the leather ball with an underarm pendulum action to the batter, whose aim is to strike it and then run past the four bases set out in a diamond shape, returning to the 'home' base to score a rounder without it being either caught by a fielder (of which there can be up to nine) or returned to a manned post before the batter arrives. The game is great fun to play and has remained especially popular within schools and with children in the summer months on parks up and down the country. Its versatility - all that is really required apart from the bat and ball is an outdoor green space of sufficient size - means that games can be played in urban parks with little planning or indeed expense. For the working-class children of inner city Manchester during the war it was probably the most accessible sport they could partake in.

With the present painting, executed the same year as Lowry's first exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in London, the composition has been carefully considered. The action takes centre stage with the game situated on nothing more than a piece of rough ground; a line of coal carts on the horizon hinting at the likely occupation of the childrens' parents. The youngster in red holding the ball is positioned in the middle of the picture as the batter faces the viewer, a few metres away. The four children on their posts in the diamond shape spread out from these, waiting in anticipation, with fielders beyond. A few casual onlookers surround them, whilst other people go about their daily lives. On the right-hand side a sweeping, curved path adds a rhythmic element to the composition and leads our eyes up to the smoking industrial backdrop, so that even in their leisure time the children are reminded of their likely future employment.

The characteristic thick white ground applied to the panel has been allowed to show through the thin layer of green on the area of grass, so that the surface the children play on has a beautiful luminosity to it, in stark contrast to the dark red-brown and black of the houses on the left hand-side. In all its passages Rounders is a perfectly realised and superbly executed Lowry oil, painted during a time when the artist's technical brilliance was coming to the fore. It brilliantly marries children at play, unaware of the atrocities of the war which would consume industrial Britain for the following seven years, with his keen interest in leisure activities of the working-class, to create an amazingly evocative slice of north-west England at the outbreak of conflict.