This is a painting of Chapel Hill, an area in the town of Huddersfield, Yorkshire. Lowry painted it in 1965 and it's exactly what he liked to paint pictures of a bustling industrial town. There are factory buildings, tall chimneys, terraced houses and the streets and pavements are filled with people, a lorry, vans and many dogs. In the distance, on the outskirts of the town, are a patchwork landscape of fields, a large sloping hill and a winding road.
Before you touch the tactile picture I'll briefly describe a bit about Lowry. Laurence Stephen Lowry was born in Manchester in 1887. Throughout his adult working life he had a job as a rent collector and clerk. He kept his job a secret, because he felt that he would not be taken seriously as an artist if it were known that he only studied art and painted after work and at weekends. Lowry has a distinctive style from his subject matter, to his paint colours and viewpoint and I'll explain a little bit about these now, so you can begin to get a feel for his paintings. Many of his paintings depict the everyday industrial landscape that people lived and worked in