One of a series exploring the lives and work of major artists associated with St Ives, this book looks at Peter Lanyon's life and landscape painting, from his childhood friendship with Patrick Heron to the international acclaim which he received in the 1960s. It also analyzes the critical response to his work. Among the leading artists of the St Ives school, Lanyon was the only one who had been born in Cornwall, and he was passionate about the local landscape, particularly the coastline. Influenced by his early contact with Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, he portrayed this scenery in constructions and near-abstract paintings. His later work, with its emphasis on gesture and the expression of inner feeling, has much in common with Abstract Expressionism. In 1959 Lanyon discovered gliding, which he loved for the new view that it provided of the landscape, and five years later he died, aged 46, as a result of a gliding accident.