Christie's London · Auctions October 2026
The St Ives School
The Peter Simon Collection is a remarkable tour de force, built through discerning connoisseurship and powerful intuition. The St Ives School is its starting point. Drawn to the luminous quality of light that bathes the Cornish coast in vivid blue, Peter Simon started collecting works by St Ives painters and sculptors who capture the shifting landscapes of British and European Modernism. From these beginnings grew a collection that would span decades and encompass the full breadth of British art, but it started here, in this light.
St Ives, Cornwall. Where the light is different. On this narrow peninsula, where the Atlantic meets the sky, a group of artists found something that would change British art forever.
Alfred
Wallis
Steamer in a Rough Sea, 1935
A retired fisherman and marine scrap dealer, Alfred Wallis began painting 'for company' after his wife's death. Using scraps of cardboard and other materials to hand, he painted the harbours, boats and seas he had known throughout his life. When Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood discovered him in 1928, they recognised an untutored genius whose naive vision held a truth that sophisticated art had lost.
View Lot: Steamer in a Rough Sea by Alfred Wallis →"What he painted was a kind of truth the sea as it feels, not as it looks. That changed everything."
Barbara
Hepworth
The Hands and the Arm, 1948
Hepworth was the defining sculptor of the St Ives movement. This intimate study, hands and an arm rendered in pencil and washes of blue on board, captures the tension between the human form and the sculptural abstraction that defined her life's work.
View Lot: The Hands and the Arm by Barbara Hepworth →Husband and wife, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth pursued form and light with equal fervour, but through utterly different lenses.
Ben
Nicholson
1934 (relief)
The intellectual engine of British modernism. Nicholson's white reliefs, precisely carved geometric compositions in luminous white, placed Britain at the forefront of international abstraction. Inscribed with the artist's address on the frame, this 1934 work distils form into its purest essence: two carved circles within overlapping rectangular planes, catching light and shadow with an almost architectural precision.
View Lot: 1934 (relief) by Ben Nicholson →
Barbara
Hepworth
Torso, 1929
Carved in 1929, at the very outset of Barbara Hepworth's career, Torso takes as its subject one of the oldest motifs in Western sculpture: the armless, headless female nude, a form stretching back to antiquity. Hepworth's version stands apart within that lineage: not a body imagined and shaped from without, but one worked from a felt, embodied knowledge of her own.
View Lot: Torso by Barbara Hepworth →
Christopher
Wood
Farm Near St Ives, 1928
Tragically brilliant, Wood connected the naive directness of Wallis with the sophistication of European modernism. A friend of Picasso and Cocteau, he brought Continental avant-garde ideas to the Cornish coast while absorbing its raw visual power. His death at 29 cut short one of the most promising careers in British art, but his influence on the St Ives movement was already profound.
View Lot: Farm Near St Ives by Christopher Wood →While Hepworth shaped the solidity of stone, Peter Lanyon took to the air painting the Cornish landscape from above, below, and inside.
Peter
Lanyon
Cloud Base, 1962
Lanyon was the only St Ives artist actually born in Cornwall. He took up gliding to experience the landscape from within, painting the thermals, air currents, cliffs, and sea as felt through the body in flight, a pursuit that would cost him his life at 46. Cloud Base pulses with the physical sensation of being airborne above the Cornish coast, white cloud mass crashing against deep violet sky: the fullest expression of a wholly original way of seeing Cornwall and a summit of the St Ives achievement.
View Lot: Cloud Base by Peter Lanyon →The Light Remains
Monsoon: The Peter Simon Collection
View the full collection: Monsoon, The Peter Simon Collection →
Christie's London · Auctions October 2026
