Laurence S Lowry painted football matches. He painted evictions, and men at work and magnetised huddles around a suicide in the street.
Little wonder then that his work was popular and that popularity - as usual - was a double-edged sword, bringing him affection among "his" people and a derision and dismissal among the critics.
Indeed, he had to go to France for his very English brand of impressionism to receive critical acclaim and serious consideration.
"He was not an artist who falls into the Home Counties view of Englishness," said co-curator Tim Clark at a preview this week.
"His subject is industry and the form of life it made. It makes it hard for the cultural elite to take seriously."
Taken together, the 90 works on show in this must-see exhibition follow his evolution from the dark satanic cityscapes to the lighter, brighter animated works of fun fairs, balloons and bunting.
But these were not naive daubings; his characters were not simply "matchstalk men and matchstalk cats and dogs" as the popular song went.
("Natural figures," he explained, "would have broken the spell of my vision so I made them half unreal.")
The former rent collector (1887-1976) was a deliberate, purposeful and ambitious chronicler of those soot-flecked times.
His faces were mini-Munch's Screams lost against the factory whistle and the brass band. He was Van Gogh with a set square - his smoky chimneys doubling as trees and the stoop-backed people swaying like wheat all set against that signature lustrous, off-white backdrop.
Clark said: "One of the things that struck us early on was the depth of his involvement with French painting of the later 19th century.
"He was trained by a talented Frenchman in Manchester, Adolphe Valette, and, curiously enough for an artist who the myth said was an isolated weirdo off on his own, he decided very early on he was going to get more sympathetic attention in Paris than in London.
"In order to take on the industrial scene he built on his understanding of the French painting and now Lowry can live successfully with Van Gogh and Pissarro."
The final of six rooms brings together for the first time the artist's seven large urban panoramas of composite northern industrial landscapes and (less successful) mining valleys of South Wales.
They were painted in the '50s and '60s and the artist himself admitted that when those unsentimental landscapes were gone, so was his desire to paint them.
He is one of Britain's most popular artists, capturing a relish for stoic street life in all its mangled and wonderful forms. Ignore the sneers, enjoy the art.
★★★★★
Until Oct 20, £16.50, tate.org.uk.
Picture details
L.S. Lowry
The Pond 1950
Oil on canvas
Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1951 © The estate of L.S. Lowry/DACS 2011
