This untitled drawing is an atmospheric, semi-abstract work on paper by one of the leading abstract painters in post-war Britain, Peter Lanyon. As with much of Lanyon’s output of the 1950s, it clusters together a variety of angular, semi-transparent landscape motifs: a crescent form at the centre of the work suggests the sweeping curve of a hill in the mid-distance; an armature of rectilinear pencil lines frames the composition on the left and right; the central structure, composed of emphatic verticals and horizontals, may suggest a looming figure, telegraph poles, or an architectural structure (contemporaneous drawings include St Just’s chapel, parish church tower and war memorial). The juxtaposition of precise pencil markings with roughly applied, heavily smudged charcoal suggests the experimental, preparatory nature of the work.

The work was owned for many years by the distinguished collector and arts administrator Sir Nicholas Goodison. Speaking of this work, he commented, ‘This may be one of the many preliminary drawings for St Just.’ Executed over eighteen months between 1951 and 1953, St Just (fig. 1) is a large-scale multi-layered painting which evokes the history and landscape of Cornwall in section and in profile. It is widely regarded as a seminal moment in art of the period, as well as being one of Lanyon’s greatest achievements. It was ‘the first large-scale oil [Lanyon] ever completed on canvas’, and it went through a series of revisions as the artist’s intentions grew more profound and specific. Throughout the eighteen-month working period for St Just, Lanyon referred to the work as a ‘crucifixion’. An element of the crossbar armature at the heart of this drawing connects it to the traditional iconography alluded to in the working title. (He also briefly considered setting the work within a multi-panel altarpiece arrangement, complete with predella.)

Peter Lanyon was one of the most original artists of his generation, successfully translating real-life subjects into a highly personal world of meaningful but abstracted forms. Early preliminary sketches for St Just reveal that the crossbar motif at the heart of the painting originated as a few telegraph poles and their wires, studied on the outskirts of the Cornish town of St Just. More developed studies show that Lanyon was beginning systematically to eschew single-point perspective, instead preferring to combine multiple and divergent viewpoints within a single image. The effect significantly enriches the formal complexity of the resulting work. The sophisticated abstract appearance of this drawing strongly indicates that it was completed towards the end of Lanyon’s preparation phase. As the Lanyon specialist Toby Treves has explained, the later drawings ‘show an increasing level of abstraction, until they reach the point […] where there are only hints of landscape forms or buildings.’