The Painting Prime Ministers Keep Choosing: Lowry, Downing Street and the Collection You Never See
Some paintings become famous because they hang in a great museum. A few become famous for where they hang somewhere else entirely. L.S. Lowry’s Lancashire Fair, Good Friday, Daisy Nook (1946) belongs to the second group. It is not in Tate or the National Gallery. For most of the last sixty years it has been on a wall in 10 Downing Street, and this week it emerged that it is going back there.
According to The Art Newspaper, the prime minister Andy Burnham has asked for the painting to return to No. 10 once it has finished its current outing in L.S. Lowry: The Theatre of Life, the major retrospective that opened at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes yesterday and runs until February 2027. It is a small story that opens a window onto something most gallery-goers rarely consider: the art that the British state owns, lends and hangs on its own walls.
A painting with a political CV
The record of Lancashire Fair is remarkable. The Government Art Collection, which owns it, has shared figures showing that the picture has been on display in Downing Street for 40 of the past 60 years. It has hung there under every prime minister from Harold Wilson to Keir Starmer, with a single exception: Tony Blair. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport says it cannot think of any other work that has been requested for No. 10 as often.
It was Wilson who first chose it, for his private office in the 1960s. Anthony Spira, MK Gallery’s director and co-curator of the new show, told The Art Newspaper that the story goes that Wilson took down a portrait of Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, to put up a painting of working people enjoying themselves. That swap, a founding father of the office replaced by a crowd at an Easter fair, says plenty about how Wilson wanted to be seen.
Lowry, characteristically, kept politicians at arm’s length. Wilson tried to give him a knighthood in 1968 and he turned it down, as he later declined the even rarer Companion of Honour. Margaret Thatcher was perhaps his keenest admirer at Westminster. Spira recounts that she tried for some time to meet him, only for the meeting to come too late: Lowry died in February 1976. When she reached Downing Street in 1979, Lancashire Fair went into her private office. Later premiers gave it pride of place on the landing at the top of the famous staircase.
Burnham’s choice has a personal logic too. He is a long-standing Lowry enthusiast, and Daisy Nook, the country park on the edge of Oldham and north Manchester where the fair took place, sits close to the constituency he represents.
What the Government Art Collection actually is
The Government Art Collection is one of the largest and least visible public collections in the country. It holds more than 15,000 works and exists to place British art in government buildings in the UK and in embassies, residences and offices around the world. In effect, it is a national collection whose main audience is diplomats, civil servants and visiting dignitaries rather than the public.
That makes the choices interesting. When a prime minister picks a painting, it becomes part of the backdrop to photographs, broadcasts and state visits. In 2024, Keir Starmer’s team replaced royal portraits in No. 10 with scenes from Paula Rego’s Crivelli’s Garden, a rehang that was widely read as a statement about modern Britain. Lowry’s Easter crowd, consistently chosen by premiers of both main parties, has come to perform a similar job: a reminder of northern, industrial, working Britain at the heart of power.
Why it matters for the rest of us
It would be easy to treat all this as Westminster trivia, but much of the country’s art does not live where we expect it to. It sits in government offices, civic buildings, hospitals, universities and private collections, and it surfaces only when an exhibition borrows it. The MK Gallery retrospective is a case in point: alongside Lancashire Fair, it includes The Pond, which Wilson used on his first Christmas card from No. 10 in 1964, and two works not seen in public for more than seventy years, Beach Scene, Lancashire (1947) and A Football Match (1932).
For gallery-goers, that is the real opportunity. A painting that has spent decades on a staircase most of us will never climb is, for the next four months, hanging in a public gallery that anyone can walk into. Once the show closes, it goes back behind the famous black door.
Seeing it while you can
If you visit, look at Lancashire Fair with its history in mind. Painted the year after the war ended, it shows a holiday crowd at leisure rather than at work, which is perhaps why it has appealed to politicians of every stripe. Then remember that every loan in the room represents someone agreeing to give up a picture for a while. Shows like this are where hidden collections become shared ones.
L.S. Lowry: The Theatre of Life is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, until February 2027.