Painted in 1956, this small, intensely worked composition belongs to a pivotal moment in Peter Lanyon's development as a landscape painter. For Lanyon, landscape was never simply a view to be recorded. He sought instead to convey the experience of being physically within a place - bringing together land, sea, air weather and movement, and often combining different sensations and view points within a single image.

The tightly interlocking forms of this work together with its emphatic passages of black, white, grey and red, have strong echoes of Lanyon's Europa paintings and three-dimensional works of 1954-55 which were inspired by the Greek myth of Europa and the bull. These works took shape while Lanyon was living in Anticoli Corrado, a steeply rising hilltop town in the Abruzzi mountains east of Rome. The idea that landscape and the human body could become inseparable occupied Lanyon for several years. Heron writing about Lanyon in the Arts in 1956 described 'Europa' as a 'nude landscape'. The echoes of Europa lie not necessarily in the subject of the present work, but in its construction and use of colour.

1956 was a particularly significant moment in Lanyon's development. His painting opened into a new and increasingly expansive exploration of landscape. He made his first 'skyscapes' that year whle works such as 'High Ground' and 'Sand Bar' reveal his growing concern with air, weather, movement and the physical sensation of being within a landscape. In a letter of November 1956, Lanyon explained his approach to landscape as a 'direct sensuous apprehension' of his involvement with it, rather than a single view or separate view points - rather the work could embody different aspects of an experience simultaneously.

The year also brought an important encounter with contemporary American painting. In early 1956 Lanyon saw the Tate Gallery's landmark exhibition Modern Art in the United States, which included work by the emerging Abstract Expressionists. Although Lanyon was already familiar with aspects of American painting and his own work had been developing independently towards a freer, more abstract language, the exhibition provided an important confirmation of those developments. The following year, in January 1957, he travelled to New York for his first solo exhibition at the Catherine Viviano Gallery, where he encountered the American art world at first hand and established relationships with artists including Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Wilem de Kooning.

In this small but remarkably concentrated painting, the construction language of the 'Europa' period begins to open towards the greater spatial and expressive freedom that would characterise his landscapes of the later 1950s.