![Music Mastro! Makng Music around the World, Panpipes, photograph, Wikimedia Commons. music maestro making music around the world](https://sp-ao.shortpixel.ai/client/to_auto,q_glossy,ret_img,w_300,h_530/https://livingpaintings.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Book-Clubs-Music-Maestro-Panpipes-300x530.jpg)
![Album 1 The first collection of paintings from the National Gallery, Arnolfini Marriage by Jan van Eyck, 1434, oil on oak. Portrait of a wealthy couple holding hands in their bedchamber. The man on the left wears a long black gown and large brimmed top hat the lady on the right wears a fine green gown and frilled white veil. A small dog stands by her feet.](https://sp-ao.shortpixel.ai/client/to_auto,q_glossy,ret_img,w_300,h_230/https://livingpaintings.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Album-1-The-First-Collection-of-Paintings-from-The-National-Gallery-Arnolfini-Marriage-300x230.jpg)
Suitable for: Book Clubs
Sponsored by: Garfield Weston Foundation
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Here we have two great paintings from the 20th century by well loved artists. Lowry depicts industrial Huddersfield with his matchstick people. Spencer gives us a farm scene in Berkshire with himself and his wife among the cows. All is not what is seems though – go beyond the canvas and discover more about these two artists and the places they painted.
I hear Mr Johnson's little boy call "Harry, Harry" down below in the street and anon I hear his scuttling feet across the gravel as he runs past our house. Our back iron gate swings open and hits the ivied wall out of which it is built, with a bang, then quick steps up the passage, then the sound of the milk can opening and of the jug drawn off the window sill. Then I think of what joy is before me in a full day."
33 years later this piercing memory engenders "The Farm Gate" of 1950. Its subject is the scene watched wistfully from the bedroom window of Spencer's memory. Its focus is Spencer himself, newly married to his first wife, Hilda, standing by the wall of Ovey's farm. With great concentration Spencer struggles to secure the locking bar of the gate opened by Hilda.
Huddersfield by Laurence Stephen Lowry
The Farm Gate by Sir Stanley Spencer CBE, RA
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