GOING TO THE MATCH
signed in pencil L.S.Lowry lower right margin; with the Fine Art Trade Guild stamp lower left margin
offset lithograph
52 x 68cm; 20 1/4 x 26 3/4in
74 x 86cm; 29 x 33 3/4in (framed)

Property from a Private Collection, Cambridgeshire

Provenance
Acquired by the aunt of the present owner in the early 1970s.

Printed in 1972 in an edition of 300, the present work is the limited edition lithograph Lowry produced of one of his most popular oil paintings from 1953 of the same title. Lowry had originally entered his oil painting Going to the Match into a competition held jointly by the Football association and the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1953. The entries had to make a connection between art and football. Lowry's Going to the Match won first prize.

The work depicts crowds of his iconic ‘matchstick men’ swarming to a football match at the stadium at Burnden Park, the former home of Bolton Wanderers, at the time one of the leading clubs in the country. Lowry was in fact a Manchester City fan but the Bolton ground was close to Pendlebury where Lowry lived (the stadium was demolished in 1999). In the work Lowry is an outside observer of human life and not part of the crowd he depicts as in many of his works. Lowry focuses on the fans attending the match rather than the game itself, combining his most popular subjects: the industrial landscapes of the north of England, the role of sport in the everyday lives and the weekly rituals of those who worked in the mills and factories.

Lowry's 1953 oil was sold at Christie's London on 19th October 2022 where it was purchased by the Lowry Arts Centre, Salford (with the help of the Law Family Foundation), for £7.8 million. The painting had been loaned to the Centre for 22 years when it was put up for auction by the then owners, The Professional Footballers' Association.