Born into a wealthy St Ives family who had made money from tin mining, he received lessons from the traditional marine painter Borlase Smart, linking him to an
earlier phase of St Ives art, before he
threw in his lot with Hepworth and Nicholson, who gave him lessons in Cubism in Little Parc Owles, a house belonging to the
critic Adrian Stokes that Lanyon himself later bought.