The Fever Van

The Fever Van' shows an ambulance arriving to collect a patient from a small terraced house in Salford. The sufferer probably has diptheria or scarlet fever, both highly contagious diseases and widespread in industrial Britain in the 1930s. A lack of vaccinations meant that such diseases were frequently fatal.

Lowry's treatment of the theme avoids excessive sentimentality; he has chosen a distant view of the ambulance and the crowd gathered around it rather than a close-up of the drama. He was interested in the effect of accidents on the urban scene and said: "Accidents interest me - I have a very queer mind you know. What fascinates me is the people they attract. The patterns those people form, and the atmosphere of tension when something has happened… Where there's a quarrel there's always a crowd… It's a great draw. A quarrel or a body."

Lowry is often characterised as a self-taught artist, but despite the apparent naivity of his work, drawing was always the foundation of his paintings. The cropped edges of 'The Fever Van' give a feeling of incompleteness to the scene, suggesting the ephemeral and fragmentary character of life in industrial towns.