Now one of the most well-known and beloved twentieth century British artists, L.S. Lowry's reputation first rose slowly throughout 1940s and 1950s, just before his appeal to collects ors really grew. Much of his popularity was built on his success with industrial scenes, and by this point, he was an R.A. and he had also turned down both an O.B.E and a C.B.E.

Whilst the industrial landscape had been at the heart of Lowry's art through the years of obscurity and struggle, its centrality had waned in his own mind. By the t.mes he left his home town of Pendlebury in Salford, just on the outskirts of Manchester in 1948, he had already begun to paint images where the place was of less and less importance, the people being the centre of his attention. By 1952 and his retirement from the Pall Mall Property Company, his industrial landscapes were becoming ever more idealised, either as a standard mill/chimney/street compositional form, or the huge sweeping composite views of industrial panoramas. His relationship to the industrial landscape and his need to paint it were shifting.

Lowry wanted to paint people, figures he had seen, met, observed. People whose lives were not easy, people burdened by cares, misfortune, disability. He was at pains to ensure that no-one should think he was laughing at these souls, merely hoping to capture something that spoke to him, perhaps an echo of his own perceived 'otherness', his place outside the normal lives he saw many of his friends living.

Lowry's meeting with Monty Bloom was thus perhaps one of the more fortuitous of his life. Bloom had initially sought to commission an industrial landscape, but on visiting the artist found himself distracted by the figure paintings he saw. Lowry laid out about twelve, Bloom picked six and a price was agreed: he had found someone who saw in these paintings his particular vision. Bloom's buying continued, to the point where his wife forbade any more pictures entering the house and he had to keep them in the boot of his car. His compulsion to buy these Lowry paintings was only equalled by the artist's compulsion to paint them, and he was to build a formidable collects ion.

Originally in Monty Bloom’s collects ion, Woman with a Twisted Mouth is a perfect example of exactly the kind of image that Lowry was now creating. There is a backdrop, but it is the figure before us who is the focus. She stands grasping her hands, bundled up against the cold, feet planted definitely, facing the viewer. Questioned about these paintings by his long-standing friend Hugh Maitland, Lowry suggested that he felt that he had to bring these figures, who he believed were either marginalised or simply ignored, to a place where they would be acknowledged, and in Woman with a Twisted Mouth he has done this to the full extent of highly hailed artistic ability.