Peter Lanyon

Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon, Aidan Ellis Publishing, Henley-on-Thames, 1971, cat.no.38, pl.16 (ill.in b/w);
Andrew Lanyon, Peter Lanyon 1918-1964, Penzance 1990, p.111 (ill.in col.).

Lanyon began teaching at Corsham Court, the home of the pioneering Bath Academy of Art, in 1950 and thus his arrival coincides with the period during which he was working on Porthleven (Tate Collection), one his most important paintings and a work which radically readjusted the contemporary representation of landscape. Porthleven was Lanyon’s entry for the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition, and although it was not a prize winner, it was bought by the Contemporary Art Society and presented to the Tate. Whilst there were precedents in his work for various elements of the painting, the synthesis of varied viewpoints, actual, mythical, historical and imagined, created a painting in which Lanyon aimed to capture the very essence of both the subject and the artist’s own involvement in that subject.

In so doing, Lanyon used drawings, gouaches and constructions to help fix the disparate parts in his mind and each of these independent works would then lead to other works that draw away from the original source. This immersion in his subject often means that the relations between works of each period are necessarily intertwined. Thus the present work, appears to have a good deal in common with Corsham Summer of 1952 (Private Collection) in its tall upright format and colouring, but this is also true of Harvest Festival and Green Mile, both of 1952 (both Private Collection). These two paintings seem to have been notionally intended by Lanyon to be displayed as pendants to another important ‘place’ painting, St.Just, again of 1952 (Private Collection). This fluidity in both meaning and subject whilst remaining within a perceived historical tradition of landscape painting is quite unique in British art at the time and sets Lanyon’s work apart from all his contemporaries.