Michael Ayrton

Matthiesen Ltd., London

Bart Lytton, U.S.A

Sale, Butterfield & Butterfield San Francisco, 27 April 1995, lot 3355, where acquired by the present owner

The present work is one of several works painted by Michael Ayrton in Greece, alongside the images of Icarus in flight and falling which preoccupied him at the time. The luminous intensity of Greek light came to him as something like a revelation and from 1959-62 he painted a series of more-or-less abstract landscapes and seascapes at all times of day and varying conditions of weather, recording his visual and imaginative experiences of a landscape of which he wrote as:

'... a sculptured land, a land of bone and muscle and the sea sinews run through and along every part of it ... and the slow, contemplating mountains bedded in tumbled rocks ... all changing under the light [and] you must contain it as an idea before you can paint it.'

Justine Hopkins, Michael Ayrton: A Biography, 1994, p.272

Under the influence of the light and the landscape his painting technique changed and developed, becoming more fluid, textural and expressive with a new sensitivity to the nuances of atmosphere and colour and an energetic freedom of gesture - all of which are apparent in this evocation of fading light over what is probably a Cretan landscape.

This particular painting has an interesting provenance, being one of a number of landscapes from about this time bought by American collector Bart Lytton, flamboyant and controversial financier, Democratic Party fundraiser and philanthropist, who had a passion for contemporary art and was a moving spirit in the foundation of LACMA before opening his own short-lived Lytton Center for the Visual Arts in 1965.

Justine Hopkins