Lowry’s Palette: An artist’s use of colour

Rent collector by day and painter by night, Lowry’s hugely popular paintings depicted the working class industrial life of his native North-West England. “I am a simple man,” he once said. “I use simple materials: Ivory Black, Vermilion, Prussian Blue, Yellow Ochre, Flake White and no medium.” These were the Winsor and Newton Artists Oil colours that Lowry, himself, said he limited himself to although we now know, thanks to photographic evidence unearthed by the BBC whilst making an episode of ‘Fake or Fortune’, that he also used Zinc and Titanium Whites.