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拍品專文
We are very grateful to Toby Treves for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Godrevy Lighthouse is a wonderful example of Peter Lanyon’s early investigation into abstraction, the painting belonging to his first series of works which reference places by name. Lanyon first referred to this body of work as the Penwith Series, naming West Penwith (Tate) and Portreath (private collection) directly, whilst also alluding to a further group of works which likely included the present work.
The subject of the present work references the lighthouse visible from St Ives, built to guide boats past a dangerous reef off the coast of the town. First exhibited in 1949, the year it was painted, the critic David Lewis identified in the present work ‘the beginnings of a personal style’ as he began to experiment with largely abstract compositions (T. Treves, Peter Lanyon: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings and Three-Dimensional Works, London, 2018, p. 205). The lighthouse is represented through a white line visible on the top half of the composition, the headland referenced in the bottom half. These descriptive, topographical elements however are difficult to discern, Lanyon focusing instead upon documenting his subjective approach to landscape. Painted on gesso prepared board, Lanyon applied thin layers of diluted oils, rubbed back to leave a pale surface. With layers of blue, green and brown paint, lightly built up and scraped back, the experience of the landscape is conveyed through the semi-transparent forms built upon each other. Lanyon wrote that he was ‘concerned no longer with space perspective, tone rendering or any of the formulae invented for the creation of verisimilitude … [the] aim was not to “photograph” nature but to re-present nature of which he himself is part' (the artist, quoted in C. Stephens, Peter Lanyon: the edge of the landscape, London, 2000, p. 37).
Throughout Lanyon’s career, his work speaks of his personal attachment to Cornwall. Godrevy Lighthouse may be one of the first paintings where Lanyon identified human figures in the landscape. Andrew Causey suggests how ‘the division into two in Godrevy Lighthouse looks forward to this division in Porthleven [painted in 1951, Tate St Ives], in which Lanyon himself saw, after he had completed the painting, two figures embedded’ in the landscape (A. Causey, Peter Lanyon: Modernism and the Land, London, 2006, pp. 59-56). The present work sheds light upon Lanyon’s belief that the ‘landscape is not something independent of human life, but comes into being for the embodied viewer’ (ibid., 100).
Godrevy Lighthouse is a wonderful example of Peter Lanyon’s early investigation into abstraction, the painting belonging to his first series of works which reference places by name. Lanyon first referred to this body of work as the Penwith Series, naming West Penwith (Tate) and Portreath (private collection) directly, whilst also alluding to a further group of works which likely included the present work.
The subject of the present work references the lighthouse visible from St Ives, built to guide boats past a dangerous reef off the coast of the town. First exhibited in 1949, the year it was painted, the critic David Lewis identified in the present work ‘the beginnings of a personal style’ as he began to experiment with largely abstract compositions (T. Treves, Peter Lanyon: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings and Three-Dimensional Works, London, 2018, p. 205). The lighthouse is represented through a white line visible on the top half of the composition, the headland referenced in the bottom half. These descriptive, topographical elements however are difficult to discern, Lanyon focusing instead upon documenting his subjective approach to landscape. Painted on gesso prepared board, Lanyon applied thin layers of diluted oils, rubbed back to leave a pale surface. With layers of blue, green and brown paint, lightly built up and scraped back, the experience of the landscape is conveyed through the semi-transparent forms built upon each other. Lanyon wrote that he was ‘concerned no longer with space perspective, tone rendering or any of the formulae invented for the creation of verisimilitude … [the] aim was not to “photograph” nature but to re-present nature of which he himself is part' (the artist, quoted in C. Stephens, Peter Lanyon: the edge of the landscape, London, 2000, p. 37).
Throughout Lanyon’s career, his work speaks of his personal attachment to Cornwall. Godrevy Lighthouse may be one of the first paintings where Lanyon identified human figures in the landscape. Andrew Causey suggests how ‘the division into two in Godrevy Lighthouse looks forward to this division in Porthleven [painted in 1951, Tate St Ives], in which Lanyon himself saw, after he had completed the painting, two figures embedded’ in the landscape (A. Causey, Peter Lanyon: Modernism and the Land, London, 2006, pp. 59-56). The present work sheds light upon Lanyon’s belief that the ‘landscape is not something independent of human life, but comes into being for the embodied viewer’ (ibid., 100).