Shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, Ben Nicholson and his wife Barbara Hepworth moved from Hampstead to Carbis Bay in Cornwall. Between 1934 and 1943, Nicholson made work that was almost exclusively non-representational, yet upon his arrival on the Penwith Peninsula, he responded to the rugged Cornish landscape and made a small number of paintings and drawings, of which this is one. Higher Carnstabba Farm is depicted here, situated near the coast and roughly equidistant between Carbis Bay to the south, Treloyhan to the north and Halsetown to the west. This drawing is closely related to an oil painting of the farm from the same year (fig. 1). Nicholson returned to the subject in 1944, when he made another two oil paintings of the farm. The artist’s granddaughter, the scholar Sophie Bowness, has suggested that the view in this drawing was seen from the footpath between Carbis and Halsetown, where Nicholson perhaps made his drawing while seated on a large granite boulder. In Cornwall, Nicholson and Hepworth found a place that was serene, marked by an earthy richness and an ethereal sense of ancient history. Between 1924 and 1931, Nicholson spent part of the year at Bankshead in the county of Cumbria, and his work of that period was distinguished by a primitivist style of simplified compositions and a raw, textured surface finish. His work developed many of its defining traits in that period, and this work made in 1940 shows a partial resumption of the faux naïf style of his Cumbrian period. The drawing includes a familiar patchwork of fields, a farmhouse and farm animals – a scene that was perhaps reminiscent of Cumbria for the artist. This drawing was gifted by the artist to Philip James, a distinguished Art Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1942 until his death. James and his wife were regular visitors to St Ives and it was probably on a trip after the end of the Second World War that he received this drawing. He was a small-scale but insightful collector of contemporary artists and also owned work by Ivon Hitchens, Paul Nash and Lucie Rie.