His most characteristic pictures feature firmly drawn backgrounds of industrial buildings, often bathed in a white haze, against which groups or crowds of figures, painted in his distinctive stick-like manner, move about their affairs. Many of his paintings record his immediate surroundings, but others are semi-imaginary views. There is sometimes an element of humour, but the prevailing feeling is generally what Sir John Rothenstein calls ‘a kind of gloomy lyricism’ (Lowry was a solitary character and said, ‘Had I not been lonely I should not have seen what I did’). His first one-man exhibition, at the Reid and Lefevre Gallery, London, in 1939, established his name outside his home area for the first time, and his reputation steadily increased thereafter, although he continued to lead a spartan life. In 1976, a few months after his death, a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy brought considerable divergence of opinion among critics. Some thought of him as a great artist with an important original vision. Others represented him as a very minor talent, although interesting as a social commentator. The best collection of his work is in the Lowry, a large arts centre that opened in Salford in 2000. It includes a number of disturbing fetishistic drawings of women that came to light after Lowry's death; they have been interpreted as part of his ‘melancholy and tortured’ view of the world.