The celebrated painter began visiting the North East coast in the 1940s to get away from Manchester and the house in which his mother had died in 1939. After retiring from his job at the Pall Mall Property Company he travelled widely and visited Cumberland and the North East. He had painted Berwick-on-Tweed in 1938 and stayed at the Castle Hotel several times, including August 1958, a visit which no doubt produced On the Sands, Berwick (1959). Between 1971-75, he often stayed for weeks at a time in the Seaburn Hotel at Sunderland, painting the haunting seascapes of his later period. Lowry described his discovery of Sunderland in 1960: 'One day I was travelling south from Tyneside and I realised this was what I had always been looking for.' Sunderland Museum, with six works and thirty on long-term loan, have a collection surpassed only by Salford and Manchester.