Peter Lanyon

The Artist's Estate

Toby Treves, Peter Lanyon: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings and Three-Dimensional Works, Modern Art Press, London, 2018, no. 13, illustrated p. 88

The present work and Untitled (Alsia Mill), are both rare examples of Lanyon's largest pre-war canvases at 25 by 30in. (only ten are known to have survived). The location of Cottages and Iron Gate is not certain but is thought to have been painted somwhere along the coast road between St Ives and St Just. The buildings could possibly be part of Trewey Farm, near Zennor in Cornwall - a similar iron gate and stone post are seen from an oblique angle in Untitled Zennor (Toby Treves, Peter Lanyon: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings and Three-Dimensional Works, 2018, no. 15).

Lanyon was only eighteen years old when he painted the work, and was still learning to paint en plein air with Borlase Smart. Over the following three years (from 1936 to 1939) Lanyon painted in Bruges, Ypres, Brussels, Ghent, Amsterdam & Vollendam, followed by Madeira, Capetown, Mont Aux Sources, Johannesburg, Rhodesia, Victoria Falls, Bulawayo & Zimbabwe and then Lyons, Pont-en-Royan, Valence, Aix-en-Provence, Mont Sainte Victoire & St Tropez. At the start of 1940 he joined the RAF (for six years) and found himself in Egypt, Palestine, Jerusalem, Libya & Southern Italy before returning home in 1946 to live in his father’s studio overlooking St Ives. Peter Lanyon returned to Italy three more times in 1950, 1953 and 1957 and saw Italy as “his second home”. It was his 1953 visit to Anticoli Corrado that led to him to completely re-paint his eight-foot St Just canvas - the centre-piece for a triptych that included the painting Bojewyan Farms as its predella. (St Just currently hangs in Tate Britain and Bojewyan Farms belongs to the British Council.)

Any further exhibitions that focus on Lanyon’s journey’s (within or beyond Cornwall) should start with significant paintings like Cottages and Iron Gate and Alsia Mill because they set-the-scene with Peter Lanyon learning to paint outside in the landscape, alongside well-established artists and in the places he was always going to know best. They also open the first chapter in a remarkable seventeen-year journey that started and ended on that coast road from St Ives to St Just.

Martin Lanyon