James Fox TV - National Portrait Gallery online -
The chief contender to their fame was Peter Lanyon. Mercurial, passionate and rebellious, Lanyon saw himself as the true artistic leader of his own land ... He is trying to paint what it feels like. Dr James Fox, The Art of Cornwall, BBC 2010
This is Lanyon’s memorial to the [dead] miners, and it’s called St Just after the town which most of them came. I think it’s one of the great paintings of the twentieth century. ibid.
Lanyon was on his way to becoming the Turner of the twentieth-century. ibid.
Peter Lanyon and Patrick Heron were now the torch-bearers of the St Ives movement. ibid.
Lanyon’s death was the beginning of the end for the St Ives movement. ibid.
Heron was born in Leeds, but spent much of his childhood in Cornwall. In the late 1930s he studied part-time at the Slade School of Art in London. In 1956 he bought Eagles Nest, a home in Zennor, Cornwall, where his family had lived for a time in the late 1920s. The house and its surroundings became a centre for artists and writers in St Ives and central to all of Heron’s work. In 1945 and 1946 Heron wrote reviews for the New English Weekly, and was art critic for the New Statesman and Nation (1947-54). Among his most influential written works is The Changing Forms of Art, published in 1955, the year in which his work became predominantly abstract. National Portrait Gallery online