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ILLUSTRATING a highly popular activity that paused for a few days earlier this month out of respect for the death of our late Queen Elizabeth II, L. S. Lowry’s Going to the Match, painted in 1953, for an exhibition in honour of the Football Association’s 90th anniversary, is set to kick-off a few ripples in the art market when it goes under the hammer next month.
Offered by charity The Players Foundation, it is arguably the artist’s best-known work, which has not been seen at auction since 1999, and Christie’s is expecting a new world record. will be exhibited at the King Street, SW1, showroom from October 15 to 19 and will then form the highlight of the Modern British & Irish Art Evening Sale with an estimate of £5 million–£8 million. With a single-minded devotion, the crowd is shown moving as one towards their shared focal point, the pitch, out of sight, within the stadium. ‘Lowry mastered a distance in his art that offered him the opportunity to present his viewers with an entire scene unfolding before them, as Pieter Bruegel had done before him,’ explains Nick Orchard, head of Modern British and Irish art at Christie’s. ‘He used this displacement.’
