Michael Ayrton was born in London, the son of the poet and critic, Gerald Gould and MP, Barbara Ayrton Gould. He studied art in London before visiting Paris in 1938 with the artist John Minton, where they studied with the French neo-romanticist Eugene Berman (1899-1972). A true polymath, Ayrton worked in painting, sculpture, theatre design, art criticism, film-making and radio broadcasting.
After the end of World War Two, many artists travelled to the continent, keen to revisit places and subjects which had been closed to them during the war years. In 1956 Ayrton visited Cumae, north of the Bay of Naples. Here, according to legend, the master craftsman Daedalus landed after escaping from the Cretan labyrinth with his son Icarus.
We do not have any evidence that Ayrton based this coastal-ruins painting on an actual shoreline. But given that Ayrton frequently created imaginative, myth-infused landscapes, there may be echoes of an imagined Cumae with its fragments of classical architecture floating within a half-realist, half-dreamlike setting.
The Fry Gallery is very grateful to Adam Forman for this extremely generous gift.
Sacred Place Oil on chipboard by Michael Ayrton, 1958