Peter Lanyon’s Pine Shore (1960) evokes the sensation of moving through the rugged Cornish landscape—wind cutting across cliffs, sea spray rising, and the shifting light of the coast. The painting captures not a static view but an experience of place, built from sweeping gestures of blue, earthy browns, and black linear forms. Lanyon’s abstraction is rooted in lived encounter, his brushwork translating the physical act of walking, gliding, or soaring across the land into pictorial rhythm.

Exhibited at his important 1960 show at Gimpel Fils, Pine Shore belongs to a period when Lanyon was extending his language of abstraction into one of profound physicality and movement. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not abandon landscape but reimagined it, collapsing figure and ground, air and earth, into dynamic painterly fields. His paintings of this moment placed him at the forefront of post-war British art, bridging the St Ives tradition with the wider international debates of Abstract Expressionism.

Lanyon’s significance lies partly in his ability to connect English landscape painting with the energy of American abstraction. His work was admired in the United States, where exhibitions in the early 1960s won critical attention and a dedicated and enduring following. He offered a distinctively British counterpart to the likes of Pollock and de Kooning, grounded in place yet equally expansive in ambition. This cross-Atlantic recognition helped secure his reputation as one of Britain’s most innovative voices of the era.