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An important LS Lowry painting which was commissioned to promote Britain’s second world war effort on the home front is to return to its home city.
The 1943 painting Going To Work is classic Lowry, showing a mass of workers trudging through a white industrial haze to the Mather & Platt engineering works in Newton Heath, Manchester.
It was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee and is the only Lowry painting in the collection of the Imperial War Museum.
But it has never been on permanent display in the London museum or on any display at the Manchester outpost, IWM North, which opened in 2002.
That is something of a “crazy” oversight, IWM curator Claire Brenard acknowledged given how important Lowry is to Manchester and Salford.
From Monday it goes on permanent display at IWN North. “It just seems the ideal place to hang it,” said Brenard. “It is incredibly exciting that it will finally be going on permanent display in its home city.”
Lowry was commissioned by the committee to depict a northern industrial scene, showing the efforts of men and women working in factories on the home front.
The Mather & Platt factory produced battery pumps for all types of industry. It was taken over by the government during the war and manufactured munitions and pumps for the war effort and equipment which was sent for use on the eastern front.
Lowry, who volunteered as a firewatcher on the roof of Lewis’s department store during the Blitz, was paid 25 guineas for the commission and completed the work in three months.
The War Artists Advisory Committee was set up by Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, and collected around 6,000 art works through commissions, purchases and donations. It would later buy a second Lowry, a painting of the ruins of St Augustine’s church, which is allocated to Manchester Art Gallery.
Ahead of its display in Manchester, Going To Work has been conserved, including the removal of varnish which must have been added some time after its acquisition as Lowry did not varnish his paintings.
Brenard said the varnish affected the colour balancing of the artwork, adding an unintended hint of yellow.
The display is part of a rehang of war-related art at IWM North. As well as Lowry there will be works including Building Flying-Boats by Flora Lion, who painted northern factory scenes during the first world war; and ‘The ‘L’ Press. Forging the jacket of an 18-inch gun’ by Anna Airey, one of the first women war artists employed by the new Imperial War Museum in 1918.
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