AN oil painting of Clitheroe by LS Lowry has been sold for £158,500 at auction in London.

The 1961 painting A Street In Clitheroe had been expected to sell for between £80,000 and £120,000 at Bonhams.

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The picture was put up for sale following the death last year of its owner Arnold Burton. He was youngest son of Sir Montague Burton, founder of one of Britain’s biggest tailoring manufacturers which became known as The Burton Group.

Lowry was fond of Clitheroe. His friends Josef and Prudence Kunzel lived at nearby Sawley. Mr Kunzel’s textile firm had an office in Church Street.

Christopher Dawson, a senior specialist in the modern British and Irish art department at Bonhams, said: “Clitheroe was popular with LS Lowry.

“Although he is perhaps best known for his images of the industrialised North with factories, chimneys and bustling streets, he was also intrigued by the quieter aspects of life, as demonstrated in this Clitheroe picture.”

The sale came a few days after Lowry’s Canal Scene Near Accrington went for nearly £500,000 at Christie’s. It was snapped up by a mystery bidder. The year in which Lowry painted it, 1939, was particularly difficult for him. For in 1939, his mother Elizabeth died.

A spokesman for Christie’s said: “Lowry has frequently been described as a painter of loneliness. Though many of his paintings show groups of people at work or hovering together in clusters, there is a distinct lack of sentimentality, perhaps reflecting the artist’s own detachment. The grey industrial haze that substitutes weather effects and shrouds his work in an atmospheric gloom contributes to this perception.”

The world auction record for a Lowry painting is £5,641,250, the sum paid at Christie’s on May 26, 2011 for 1949 oil painting The Football Match.