Lot Essay
Peter Cannon-Brookes in the 1984 exhibition catalogue writes 'By the summer of 1943 Michael Ayrton's landscapes had taken on a new character, more akin to those of Paul Nash, particularly in the new schematic treatment of ploughed fields and the emphasis laid upon broken trees and roots in the foreground, and these provide the transition into Ayrton's fully developed English Neo-Romantic landscapes of 1943-45 ... there is in Michael Ayrton's Neo-Romantic landscapes always an element of unquiet, even of the sinister, and as levels of meaning are peeled back these paintings grow in power and authority'.