'Head of a Sorrowful Woman' and a sketch by LS Lowry

'Head of a Sorrowful Woman', a drawing by JVL, 1957

My father had a bakery and confectionery shop in Glossop and it also had a café upstairs. A regular diner there was the artist LS Lowry, who lived in Mottram not far away. When I was an art student, studying at Salford School of Art, I met Lowry quite often in the shop and I had many a chat with him, mostly about music. He loved the bel canto repertoire, particularly the operas of Vincenzo Bellini. At one time I had an exhibition of my student work in my father's café and Lowry took a great interest in this particular drawing.

A sketch by LS Lowry drawn at Lord's Café, Glossop, on the 6th of December 1960.

I once asked 'Mr Lowry' what painting he was working on at the time. He had just finished a meal of  chicken salad, followed by apple tart and custard and many cups of tea, as was his wont. He told me that he was considering doing a painting of an entrance to a Yorkshire town (it may have been Huddersfield). You could get early Filofaxes from Chisholm's, a stationer's shop in Kingsway in London at the time and Lowry asked me for a piece of paper and something to draw with to explain what he was working on. I tore out a Filofax sheet of paper from my diary and handed over my Rapidograph. He then scribbled this drawing at great speed talking all the while. It is probably a unique drawing for Lowry to have drawn with such an instrument and on Filofax paper. When he signed it, he said, "You never know it may be worth something one of these days".

Lowry was forever leaving his walking sticks in my father's shop and his tweed suits often had an faint smell of turpentine.