George Peter Lanyon was born in St Ives in 1918, the son of William Herbert Lanyon and Lilian Priscilla Vivian. He was a leading figure in the St Ives group of artists and is best known for his abstract landscapes of Cornwall. He died at Taunton in Somerset following a gliding accident at the age of 46.
He studied at the Penzance School of Art and in 1939 he met Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and was tutored by Nicholson. He married Sheila Margaret St John Brown in 1946. They had six children some of whom also became artists.
‘When Lanyon returned to St Ives after active service in the second world war, he fell out with most of the other artists. As the only native Cornishman among them, he saw them as incomers who did not share his interest in getting under the skin of the landscape – which he attempted literally, scrambling down mine shafts as well as soaring above them.
The rift became so bitter that, according to local legend, every time he passed Nicholson’s house on the coastal path, he urinated on the gable wall – hoping that the house would eventually fall down.’ Source -The Guardian 17th Aug 2015)
He taught at the Bath Academy of Art and held his first exhibition in London in 1949. In 1959 he began training as a glider pilot “to get a more complete knowledge of the landscape” and this became the basis for his art.
He was buried at Lelant in Cornwall and his headstone bears the inscription:
I will ride now
The barren kingdoms
In my history
And in my eye
The poet W S Graham wrote a poem about Peter, The Thermal Stair.
The Lanyons 