Winter

In 1950, Ayrton moved from London to a cottage on Salisbury Plain, as he began to concentrate on sculpture and believed that it would not be possible to sculpt in London. Peter Cannon-Brookes (loc. cit., p.43) remarks that 'During the mid-1940s he had executed a series of landscapes showing a deep feeling for the English Neo-Romantic revival and for the especial qualities of English and Welsh landscape, and he had later grown to understand the Tuscan landscape with equal sensitivity. Winter, however, painted in 1950 with the curling bare branches of the trees outside the window silhouetted against the winter landscape and a skull on the window-sill comes as something of a surprise. In his yearning to expand into three dimensions, space in which to breathe freely became increasingly important'.