The Framers Forum

A customer brought this in, apparently they took to the lowry, and after a lot of deliberation the conclusion was fake, it fooled me though.

can't see the image


scrub that - i can see it now - did the customer pay a lot for it??

it had been left to them from a deceased relative, they don't know if it was purchased as original or painted for them.

What bothers me about this is the reason the Lowry gave for declaring it a fake,
Apparently everything about it is right except that there is no record of t

his picture all acording to my customer, I have known customers blatantly lie about things though.
On this occasion I came to the conclusion, if there was going to be a mistruth then they would have said it was real.

I have had on 2 separate occasions had customers bring in black and white prints with pencil drawn over the top, the signature carefully scratched and rubbed off and their own mark put over the top, and both declared it's my own work!
To which I replied ' it's very good, now have you got anything in mind for framing, original work of this quality deserves something special'.

IFGL wrote:Apparently everything about it is right except that there is no record of it'.

So it could still be genuine. No record of it, proves nothing!

Did they not test the paper and the paints? Also paper retains finger prints almost for ever, because finger prints are acidic and can even contain dead skin cells with your DNA. I don't think that they tried very hard!

It is a case of another round of bull shxx from a customer I am afraid, a 30 second google search brings up the original, it's called the church steps, it actually isn't that good either.

I did get all excited when it was put in front of me though.

lol - that did me laugh. I checked out the original too and err, well, yes.

Fell of the back of a lowry.

I was at the lowry yesterday and I would say it looks like a good fake, the palette is spot on.

However the bullSh*t story is a bit far fetched it is a well documented piece so it obviously wasn't hard to find that it was a copy.

The exhibition at the moment of lowrys favourites is good with all the famous paintings, going to the mach, coming from the mill, man with green eyes, seascape etc. Also in June there will be an exhibition of unseen paintings and sketches, many of which which were recovered from his studio at the time of his death.

Comparison to the original shows a number of differences most notably the dog in the foreground which Lowry painted with five legs!

Dogs were often used by Lowry to make up gaps in the composition and this is an extract from a Lowry Gallery guide:

The most famous example is the five-legged dog in Old Church and Steps, 1960, in which Lowry
mistakenly painted a dog with five legs. Lowry was pleased with the result, ‘Well all I
can say is it must have had five legs. I only paint what I see, you know.’

But then again there are a lot of original versions of Sunflowers painted by Van Gogh.

What got me all excited was the fact it really did look real, the board it was on looked right it just really looked like a real one, having not seen the church steps one before, I believed the story.

I guess he could have done more than one version.

Unlikely, though he did paint similar paintings Going to the match was originally painted in 1928 but a much larger painting of the same name was painted in 1953 also Coming from the mill theme was painted on more than one occasion but he didn't replicate a painting exactly.

The art business never ceases to amaze me, if that was a Lowry original it would be worth millions as a copy its worth £30.00 on ebay.
I guess somethings only worth what you can get someone to pay for it