Lowry’s Going to the Match expected to fetch £8m at auction

They stream towards the turnstiles, stick-like figures instantly familiar to anyone who has looked at a painting by LS Lowry.

In the foreground, their coats and hats are distinct. In the background, beneath the tall chimneys of a long-gone heavy industry, the people are a blur. But all of them have a common purpose: going to the match.

Next month, the painting by one of Britain’s best known and best loved painters, is set to smash records when it is put up for sale to raise money for a charity that helps professional football players.

Going to the Match, painted by Lowry in 1953, is expected to fetch up to £8m. It was last sold in 1999, when the Professional Footballers Association (PFA), the union for current and former players, paid £1.9m.

Lowry only took up painting full-time after retiring from his job as a rent collector in 1952. Before that, he generally painted late at night after his mother, with whom he lived, had gone to bed. A modest and reserved man, he turned down five separate state honours during his lifetime, including a knighthood in 1968.

The artist, famous for his industrial scenes in the north-west of England in the mid-20th century, produced a number of football paintings, of which Going to the Match is the best known.

“What they’re really about is humanity,” said Nick Orchard, head of modern British and Irish art at Christie’s, which is auctioning the painting in London next month.

“Going to the Match is about emotion, excitement, the crowd gathering, the group experience. In the industrial north-west, most workers in the mills would probably do a five-and-a-half-day week, clock off lunchtime on Saturday, off to the match Saturday afternoon, and that was the beginning of their break from working