with the patience of a saint, dancing attend-
ance in the hope of a word of encourage-
ment that never comes. ‘Have you never
liked any of my paintings, mother?’ ‘No.’
Did he stay with this termagant in a bed
jacket because the relationship was settled
and didn’t make demands on him that dis-
tracted from his work? And could it have
been a coincidence that he chose to paint
the very scenes of industrial squalor that
so offended her sensibilities? Lowry had a
famously mischievous streak. I suspect he
got a secret satisfaction from painting away
into the early hours in the attic over his dis-
approving mother’s sleeping head.lywood myth, stressing that both the paint-
ers he has played have been the opposite of
heroic. Yet for this actor raised on a coun-
cil estate in the ‘Battersea Stink’ given off
by the factories around Clapham Junction,
there is an element of the working-class
hero in both Turner and Lowry. He admits
to finding ‘a quiet and deep heroism’ in
Lowry’s ‘compulsion to get it down’ amidst
the tension and abuse.
I wonder whether Lowry was more of
a slave to his mother or the easel. Spall
sees him as ‘a willing slave’ to his mother
‘because she was the only intimate rela-
tionship he had’. He certainly portrays him
In interviews Lowry comes across as
more hard-edged. What I missed in Spall’s
interpretation was the streak of ruthless
self-sufficiency bordering on selfishness
— call it isolation, call it cussedness — that
is the mark of every serious artist. But as
Noble points out, this isn’t a documentary.
Lowry would have understood. In a 1957
BBC interview, he explains why he doesn’t
bother with perspective: ‘It’s a picture, it’s
all make-believe; after all, it’s not reality.
The whole thing is, can you get away with
what you want to say?’Mrs Lowry and Son is in cinemas now.Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall as Mrs Lowry and her son