Peter Lanyon
Painted the Cornish landscape from inside a glider, and died doing it.
Peter Lanyon was born in St Ives in 1918, the only member of the modernist group there who was actually from the town. He was taught by Borlase Smart and then by Ben Nicholson, and worked out an abstraction rooted in a specific place — the coast, the mine workings, the weather — approached from every side at once rather than from a single viewpoint. In 1959 he took up gliding in order to paint the landscape from within the air above it, and the late canvases come directly from that. He died in 1964 from injuries after a gliding accident, at forty-six.
A short career and a finite body of work, with the late gliding pictures the most sought. He built constructions in wood, glass and plastic as three-dimensional studies for paintings, and those are scarce and are a distinct category. Oils are usually on canvas or board and are frequently unsigned on the face, with title and date on the reverse, so the stretcher and backboard carry the identification and should not be replaced. Gouaches and drawings are more numerous. The estate and the standing literature are the reference.
If you own a work by Peter Lanyon
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.