The institutions with the largest holdings

The Lowry in Salford houses the most concentrated public holding of his work, built from the estate of the artist and later donations. The gallery rotates the collection and does not display everything at once, so the online catalogue is the practical starting point. Manchester Art Gallery holds a smaller but significant group, including early industrial scenes that show his development before the matchstick figures became his signature. Both institutions publish searchable databases rather than a single flat gallery view.

The Tate and the National Portrait Gallery each hold a handful of works, and neither collection is large enough to stand alone as a survey. Their value is in the catalogue entries, which often include exhibition history and medium details that regional databases omit. If you are tracing a specific painting, these two records are worth checking even when the work itself is not on display. Together the four institutions cover the core of the publicly documented output.

A working archive you can browse now

No single online source holds the complete body of work, and anyone promising a full catalogue is overselling. The practical approach is to combine a museum database with a national digitisation project and an auction record service. The list below names the routes that return actual images and catalogue entries rather than a biography page.

The BBC Your Paintings archive is the broadest single sweep of works held in UK public collections, and it includes many Lowry paintings that smaller museums have not digitised elsewhere. Use it as the wide net, then narrow by institution when you need catalogue detail.

What the catalogue reality actually looks like

A complete catalogue raisonné of Lowry's output does not exist in the form that exists for some earlier painters. Some works are privately held and never digitised, and others have changed hands without a public record. That means any online search will undercount the true total, and the gap is larger for the earlier industrial scenes than for the later Manchester street views.

If you need to verify a specific painting, start with the institution that has published a catalogue entry for it. When no institution has documented the work, an auction record or a loan history may be the only trace available. Treat any claim of a comprehensive online archive as provisional until you have checked at least two independent sources.