Anne (character of Lauri paintings)

• “Portrait of Anne” (“Portrait of Anne in a red sweater”, without date), oil , wood, 35.5 x 25 or 34.5 x 24 centimeters (according to various sources), Lauri Center in Salford , CAL052 ^[3] .
• "Anne" (no date), oil, wood, 47.5 x 34.2 centimeters, Lauri Center, No. CAL064 ^[4] .
• "Portrait of Ann H." (1952), pencil , paper, 38 x 27 centimeters. Michael Howard compares this picture with the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti " Proserpine " (1877, oil, canvas ). From an early age, Lauri was fascinated by this late work by Rossetti and was able to purchase its version in November 1964 for 5,000 guineas ^{[5] [6]} . It was this painting by Rossetti from the Lauri collection that became in 1987 the first Victorian painting sold for more than £ 1,000,000 at Christie's ^[7] . The drawing was among other images dear to the artist on the wall of Lauri’s house ^[8] .
• “Portrait of Ann” (1954, English “Ann with Plait and Black Jumper” ), oil on canvas, 36 x 26.5, Lauri Center, No. CAL054 ^[9] .
• "Mother and Child" 1956-1957, oil on canvas, 61 by 51 centimeters, Lauri painted two versions of this canvas. The artist portrayed himself as a child (writing off his face from his own photo in childhood). The boy sits on the knee of a woman who is a reflection of Proserpine by Rossetti and Anne from a 1952 painting. She is depicted in the image of her mother, almost like Madonna , but dressed in a jacket and scarf, usually associated with male workers of the pre-war period (they are also used in the portrait of Lauri 1938) ^[10] . More than in any other Lauri painting, it is noticeable here that the artist hides the Freudian associations, unusual and suggestive, under seeming simplicity. This image, according to the artist’s biographers, is convincing evidence of the complex and bizarre psychological subtext of Lauri’s paintings. "Mother and Child" is the only picture where the artist himself and his Ann are present together on the same canvas ^[10] .
• "Portrait of Ann" (1957, oil on canvas, 35.5 x 30.5 centimeters, Lauri Center, No. 1960-347). According to Lowry, this work was the first portrait that he painted in almost thirty years ^{[11] [12]} .
• “Portrait of Anne” (1957, 44.5 x 61 centimeters), Lauri Center, No. CAL015 As in the female portraits of Rossetti, Anne dominates the picture in a closed field of painting, confronting the viewer with her heavy gaze directed straight into his eyes, hiding thoughts and feelings character ^{[13] [14]} .
• "Anne" 1959, oil on canvas, 54.1 x 43.2, Royal Academy of Arts, No. 03/825, painting acquired in 1978 ^[15] .

• At the end of his life, the artist created a series of erotic graphic works that were not even known to specialists until his death. These paintings also depict the character “Anne,” but are now subjected to brutal sexually targeted and degrading torture. When these works were presented at an exhibition in the Barbican Cultural Center in 1988, art critic Richard Dorment noted in The Daily Telegraph that these works “show sexual arousal” by the artist. This group of erotic works (they depict doll-like girls with emphasized breast shapes and high tight collar-collars, cutting into faces, collars look like narrow tubes, squeezing the throat of their victims ^[11] ), which are sometimes referred to as “mannequin- sketches ”or“ puppet images ”, stored at the Lauri Center. Works are available to visitors only upon special request, but some are exhibited in the Center's public exhibition. An American writer and journalist, winner of the Booker Prize , Howard Jacobson, argued that these images would change the public perception of his well-known works if they all became widely known to the public ^{[16] [17]} .

Lauri carefully concealed his inner world from those around him. A series of portraits of Ann clearly expresses Lawrence Steven Lauri's passion for this mysterious young lady. Graceful hair lines, an intimate tilt of her face in the portrait, according to British art historian Julian Spalding , show his deep affection for her. The metallic shade of her hair, eyes and pursed lips express, according to Spalding, precisely that image of the ideal girl, to which he aspired in his art and in his own life ^[2] .

Lauri at the end of his life acquired in his collection of paintings stylized female portraits of Rossetti. “I don't like his women at all,” Lauri said, “but they fascinate me like a snake” ^[18] . He also spoke of them: “The women of Rossetti are not real women. These are dreams. ” ^[19] The somewhat intrusive formalism of Ann's portraits is far enough from the style of his industrial landscapes and is close in some respects to Rossetti's female portraits. His portraits of Anne impress some of the art critics of the ancient Egyptian gods. They are far from real everyday life, devoid of human feelings ^[2] .

Researchers hypotheses about Ann's personality

Lauri's tales of the mysterious Anne contradict one another's friends. Lauri claimed that he supposedly knew Anne well, mentioned that she died when she was still young ^[18] . Wife of the famous British local historian G.W. Timperley and co-author of many of his books, Edith Timperley, who knew the artist well, gave some details of this version to the biographer Lauri Shelley Rode , telling that the factor contributing to his emotional anguish was the death of one of his acquaintances, who allegedly caught a cold at her mother’s funeral and soon died ^[5] . Sometimes Lauri described the model as a girl from Leeds at the age of 25 (at the time she met her) and “the daughter of some people with whom he was well acquainted.” According to other Lauri tales, she was his goddaughter , and her name was Ann Hilder (or Helder) ^[11] . According to another version of the artist, Ann was a ballerina who came to him "out of nowhere" in an expensive limousine ^[2] . Some researchers believe that the character of Anne reflected in the artist’s mind the heroine of the ballet “ Coppelia ” Leo Delibes , which, it is believed, Lauri first saw during the Second World War . Lauri was passionate about ballet , regularly attended performances of the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden and in his native Manchester ^[20] . Carol Ann Lauri connects the latest images of puppet girls with Lauri's passion for this ballet, whose protagonist is a life-size mechanical doll. “He loved this ballet very much and repeatedly took me to it ... I often wondered why he took me so many times and I think that it was because he wanted to control me like a puppet,” she explained. There is another version of these images. According to her, Lauri was born in the Victorian era , so during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, as an old man, he was shocked by how much society changes around him, these changes awakened the dark side of his personality ^[19] .

Erotic drawings prompted art critics to take x- rays of other Lowry paintings. The results were shocking. Fragments of Lauri's previously innocent paintings were early versions of his later erotic images. This applied not only to street scenes, but even to the artist’s seascapes ( phallic structures rising from the waves turned out to be puppet girls under the influence of X-rays, although the artist called them his self-portraits ) ^[18] . Michael Howard suggests that Lauri's erotic figures were simply “a continuation of the practice of transforming people and the outside world into toys and machine guns”, characteristic of the artist as a whole. This obsession was also manifested in Lauri's love of the grotesque . To overcome his fear of the outside world, Lauri had to master it and defeat him in his art. He populated many of his paintings with cripples, spent time after dinner, talking with beggars, doing this not only out of compassion, but also in order to use their images in his works ^[18] .

Among the artist's acquaintances were very young girls and teenage girls ^[21] , who had the ambition to become artists. He gave them painting lessons. Some of these girls were about 12 years old, all with dark hair and dark eyes ^[18] . Lauri's employee at Thomas Alfred & son, Chartered Accountants , where the artist worked for a significant part of her life, Dorina Crouch (married to Dorin Sieja) was one of many young women and girls whom he patronized throughout his life. In her memoirs, she wrote that such a relationship was a constant feature of Lauri's life. Dorin Siea makes it clear that Lauri was an ideal gentleman for her. He was full of humor and irony, which were always his hallmarks. Together they went to concerts, exhibitions and walks. “He was very dear to me,” she said, “and if I wanted to do some ordinary things, like dancing, I had friends of my age for this” ^[5] . The girls Lauri had close contacts with had much in common with each other, and to some extent all of them were partly fantastic, partly real Anne. British art historian Michael Howard suggests that, quite possibly, Anne was an idealized reflection in Lauri's mind of all the young girls and women with whom he was familiar and to whom the aging artist showed interest ^[22] .

Artist and Carol Ann Lauri

In 1957, Lawrence received a letter from 13-year-old schoolgirl Carol Ann Lauri, she (according to one version - at the initiative of her mother) was interested in the already known at that time painter how to become an artist. At first he did not answer, but after a few months, feeling lonely, he read the letter again, obeying the impulse, he came to her without invitation to Haywood where the girl lived. Lauri made friends with Carol Ann ^[19] . Carol Ann always denied any sexual connotation of her relationship with the artist, although she admitted that he constantly took her to ballet, to restaurants, the two of them went on vacation to the sea to a hotel in Sunderland . Carol Ann said that during the trip, “Lauri accompanied her to the bedroom every evening and then returned to the living room. One evening, when she was closing the door to the bedroom, he asked: “Do you still trust me?”. She replied: “Almost” ” ^[19] . Carol Ann said: “He was interested in everything I did. He liked to watch my reaction to things, he liked to listen to me and my girlfriend, to watch how we are developing. He was the king of observers ” ^[19] .

Art historians admit that the thirteen-year-old Carol Ann Lauri began to be identified in the artist’s mind with the existing artist’s imagination “Anne” just like other girls were identified with her image for an aging artist. Carol Ann wrote of Lawrence Stephen Lauri: “[He] is bigger than my father or my mother, or anyone else. He created me ... in the image of Anne. ” ^[18] Lauri gave the girl, as she herself said, “not just material gifts, but gifts of character and education” ^[19] . She called him “Uncle Lauri,” and admitted that she never had any reason to think and talk about him except with respect and love. It was she who Lauri bequeathed to an estate worth 298,459 pounds and a significant number of works of art created by himself and other artists ^[18] . She learned about the sadistic drawings of Lauri only after his death. Biographer Lauri Rode described Carol Ann's reaction to these images with which she was introduced. At first she thought: “Oh no, no, not Uncle Lauri! Please, dear God, but not Uncle Lauri! ”Her second reaction was:“ It's me! ” Later, as a result of reflection, she realized that sadistic drawings were the dark side of Anne's image, for which she was, apparently, the latest in a series of models ^[18] .

In 2006, British artist and photographer Charlotte Hollingworth hosted the exhibition “Finding Anne” in the Chapman Gallery at Salford University . She photographed girls who looked like Lauri’s Anne as they appear in his paintings, believing that in this way one could understand Lauri’s motives and determine who Ann really was. The photographer herself became interested in this problem after meeting with Lauri’s 1964 painting “A Family of Six” (1964). The painting was inspired by the play by Luigi Pirandello “ Six Characters in Search of the Author ”. Hollingworth believes that Anne is the second character on the right in this picture ^[23] .

At first, the photographer was intrigued by the intrigue itself - an old man who had “ platonic relations with a group of very young girls who all looked the same. Each time one was replaced by another - a younger one. ” Then she began to explore the artist's work and the role of the image of Anne in him. The conclusion she came to: “[Anne] is an integral part of his ideal woman who is forever young, innocent, and spotless in life. She is an escape from his gloomy view of the world "," She tells us that he was much more than a man indifferent to the problems of sex who painted city landscapes. It shows the lost opportunity of the artist’s close relationship with a woman ” ^[23] .

• Boothby, Penelope (1785-1791) - model girl of the English artist Joshua Reynolds.
• Teresa Blanchard (1925-1950) - model girl of the French artist Balthus.

• Adams, Tim . Lowry's secret life , The Guardian (March 19, 2000). Date of treatment July 22, 2017.
• Gombrich, EH LS Lowry and the AJ Thompson Collection: A Timeline . Sotheby's. Date of treatment July 22, 2017.
• Howard, Michael. Lowry: A Visionary Artist. - Lowry Press, 1999 .-- 256 p. - ISBN 978-1902-9700-04 .
• Spalding, Julian. Lowry - Oxford, New York: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1979.- 64 p. - ISBN 9-780-7148-1996-9.