User:Oldelpaso/Going to the Match

Going to the Match is an oil on canvas painting by L.S. Lowry. The painting depicts a crowd of people, drawn in Lowry's distinctive "matchstick" style, walking towards Burnden Park, a football ground in Bolton. It has been described as "perhaps the most famous football painting".

Description
The painting depicts a crowd of people walking towards Burnden Park, then the home ground of football club Bolton Wanderers. It contains a number of themes common in Lowry's works. Against a grey industrial backdrop, a huddled mass of people drawn in matchstick style lean forward in the direction of their common goal. A number of dogs are visible in the foreground.

Mervyn Levy described the painting as "Manchester Impressionism at its most subtle".

History
Lowry's home in Pendlebury was approximately seven miles from the Burnden area of Bolton, and he regularly watched matches at Burnden Park. The 1953 painting was not Lowry's first of Burnden Park; he created a similar work in 1946. However, the 1946 version measured 11cm by 9cm, in comparison to the 1953 version's 70cm by 90cm. The painting was Lowry's entry into a football art competition organised by The Football Association in honour of the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, for which it won first prize. The following year the painting formed part of an Arts Council exhibition entitled "Football and the Fine Arts".

The painting set a record auction price for a 20th century British work when it was sold at the London auction house Sotheby's in 1999. The buyer, the Professional Footballers' Association (PFA), paid £1,926,500, far in excess of the pre-auction estimate of £500,000. The previous record for a 20th Century British painting was £1.2 million, for Stanley Spencer's Crucifixion in 1990; the record for a Lowry had been held by Piccadilly Circus (1959), sold for £562,000 in 1998. The record for a Lowry work was subsequently surpassed in 2007 by the sale of his 1946 painting Good Friday, Daisy Nook for £3,772,000.

Following the purchase by the PFA, the painting was loaned to first Salford Art Gallery, then The Lowry museum, also in Salford. The former was the first time the work had been displayed in public since an exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1976. The painting has been on display at the National Football Museum in Manchester since July 2012, when the museum relocated to Manchester from Preston.