Peter Lanyon valuation
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.
What a work by Peter Lanyon is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 8 February 1918, St Ives
- Died
- 31 August 1964, Taunton
- Movement
- Modernism
More on Wikipedia.
Gimpel Fils, Corsham and the gliding paintings
Lanyon showed at the Lefevre Gallery in London in 1949 and from 1952 with Gimpel Fils, taught at the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham from 1950 to 1957, and ran St Peter's Loft, an art school in St Ives, with Terry Frost and William Redgrave. He won second prize at the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool in 1959 and had his first solo show in New York at the Catherine Viviano Gallery in 1957.
He took up gliding in 1959 and died in 1964 after a gliding accident. Gallery labels from Gimpel Fils and Viviano on the backs of paintings are useful provenance and should be kept.
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.
