This major painting is an important example of Lanyon's synthesis of abstract, figurative and landscape elements. Indeed Lanyon, himself, considered Beach Girl to be one of his key works, making it an important painting in twentieth century British art.

In a slide lecture, edited for the British Council by Alan Bowness in 1963, Lanyon selected this work alongside four other important paintings - Europa (British Council Collection), the Europa Sculpture, Susan and Salome - to explain the development of his work.

Martin Lanyon, one of the artist's sons, writes that in the notes for this lecture "Peter Lanyon always refers to the sequence of paintings running from Europa through Susan to Beach Girl and Salome with other important paintings within the sequence including St Just, Lulworth and Long Sea Surf." (Martin Lanyon, letter March 2004).

Beach Girl was inspired by a beach in St Ives and according to Martin Lanyon "Beach Girl was a development out of at least two themes established in earlier pictures: (i) the shore as female and the sea as male and (ii) the rolling-over motion of the female body.... Beach Girl, itself, arose from drawings and goauches modelled on a St-Ives-based Norwegian muse called Britt Saether. It seems likely that Beach Girl was completed in Jan. 1961. It would have been worked-up during the last few months of 1960 alongside other major paintings such as Salome."

In his notes for the British Council lecture Peter Lanyon wrote that Beach Girl was part of "a return to the problem of the figure in landscape. The myths of Orpheus, Eurydice and Salome are all concerned with love and death. The Beach Girl with life: a rolling picture referring back to the Europa of 1954". In the final text for the lecture Peter Lanyon adds that in Beach Girl "there is no specific reference to any part of the body but there is the sort of rolling over motion that one might expect to see on a beach... I like using suggestions of human forms in my paintings - even in the landscape - because that's something you respond to and seem to take part in."

As Martin Lanyon explains "In Beach Girl he discovered an image that combined all of these things: weather; shoreline as female; motion of the body; motion of the viewer; sensuality and intimacy combined with the new and increased confidence that was to lift his painting to new levels of bravado from 1960 onwards." (letter March 2003)

Beach Girl also illustrates the way that in a number of Peter Lanyon's most important paintings a tactile response to landscape is combined with buried or partially buried suggestions of the human form, perhaps most famously in St Just (1953), where a focus is provided by the suggestions of a rib cage and the extended arms of a crucified figure. A small number of these works take this even further to combine more overtly sexualized references to the female body with references to landscape, coast or sea. In Europa (1954) the starting point is the Greek myth with its combining of sex and violence, but the resulting, heavily structured image, highly abstracts this initial stimulus. In contrast, in Beach Girl (1961) the forms are highly eroticised and the sensual paint is fleshy in colour to create the impression of a body being not just viewed but caressed. As Chris Stephens has written: "touch came to take a position alongside vision in his approach to the body." (Chris Stephens, Peter Lanyon, 2000).

Discussing Beach Girl Andrew Causey has described such paintings as "human landscapes" (Andrew Causey, Peter Lanyon. His Painting, 1971, p.20) and has elsewhere elaborated on the figurative presence of Beach Girl: "the picture seems to suggest an analogy between the figure and the motion of a breaker rolling over and dispersing. The structure of the painting, its formation into compartments by vertical divisions and the long area of greyish paint along the top, recall the work of Ivon Hitchens, whom Lanyon held in high regard. Hitchens had shown three pictures of recumbent nudes in landscapes in his exhibition at the Waddington Galleries in 1960." (Peter Lanyon, Arts Council, 1978).

But as well as any possible affinities with Ivon Hitchens, clearly the sensuality of Beach Girl had a specific stimulus and Lanyon, himself, described the painting as "a picture about girls on Sandy Beaches" and specifically referred to "a gorgeous Norwegian. Like a Viking in a Bikini". (Peter Lanyon, notes for a slide-lecture, 1963). As Sheila Lanyon, the artist's widow recently recalled: "it is a roly-poly blonde turning over on St Ives Beach... My daughter Jane always wished it was her - so I gave it to her in 1984. It took a year to get to her in Australia, as it somehow managed to be in Shanghai on the way. Blondes do get around." (letter from Sheila Lanyon, March 2004). Prior to this it hung in the Lanyon's family home at Carbis Bay for many years.

We are grateful to Sheila Lanyon and Martin Lanyon for their help in cataloguing this work.