Peter Lanyon

Peter Lanyon (1918–1964) was one of the leading British painters of the post-war period and a central figure in the St Ives School. Born and raised in Cornwall, he developed a highly personal form of landscape painting in which the physical experience of place — wind, sea, cliffs, weather and movement — was transformed into increasingly abstract compositions.

Lanyon was born in St Ives and studied locally before attending the Euston Road School in London in 1938. His early development was shaped by contact with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo, who were living in Cornwall during the war years. He began making constructions as well as paintings, absorbing ideas from Constructivism while remaining deeply rooted in the Cornish landscape.

After wartime service in the Royal Air Force, Lanyon returned to Cornwall and became closely involved in the emerging post-war art community. He was a founder member of the Crypt Group in 1946 and later joined the Penwith Society of Arts. He also taught at Bath Academy of Art and helped establish the St Peter’s Loft School in St Ives.

Lanyon formed close friendships with a number of artists working in Cornwall, including Paul Feiler, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron and Bryan Wynter. Feiler and Lanyon became lifelong friends after meeting in Cornwall in 1949, and their shared engagement with the landscape developed in markedly different directions. In 1958 Lanyon joined Feiler and Terry Frost in welcoming Mark Rothko to Feiler’s home and studio at Kerris.

By the early 1950s Lanyon’s paintings were moving beyond conventional landscape. Works such as Trevalgan combined multiple viewpoints with a sense of motion through and above the land, creating images that could suggest aerial views, maps, cliffs, mines and weather simultaneously. In correspondence with Feiler, Lanyon described Trevalgan as one of his most significant paintings.

The Redfern Gallery included Lanyon in a number of important exhibitions during this period. His work appeared in Abstract, Cubist, Formalist, Surrealist in 1954 and in the landmark Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract: Painting in England Today in 1957, which examined the growing influence of European Tachisme and American Abstract Expressionism on British painting.

During the later 1950s Lanyon’s reputation grew internationally. He held solo exhibitions in London and New York and developed an increasingly gestural approach to painting. Although his work was often discussed in relation to Abstract Expressionism, landscape remained fundamental to him: abstraction was a means of conveying the experience of being within the landscape rather than simply looking at it.

In 1959 Lanyon began gliding, an experience that profoundly affected his late work. Seeing Cornwall from the air introduced new sensations of height, speed, turbulence and spatial disorientation, which entered paintings such as the celebrated Gliding Paintings. These works are among the most ambitious achievements of post-war British landscape painting.

Lanyon died in 1964, aged forty-six, following injuries sustained in a gliding accident. His death cut short a career that was still developing rapidly.

His work has since been the subject of major retrospectives and reassessments, and is held in important public collections including Tate and the Yale Center for British Art. The Redfern Gallery has continued to present Lanyon’s work in exhibitions of Modern British and St Ives art, including St Ives at The Redfern in 2026.