In England you can go no farther West than Cornwall. As one stands at the end of this long peninsula, at a spot appropriately known as Land’s End, one knows that the next stop across the Atlantic is America. The tourists come to Cornwall, and to Land’s End in their thousands every summer – they come out of curiosity to see what the end of England is really like - they come ~ to laze on some of the most beautiful beaches in Europe, to wonder at the quaintness of the old Cornish fishing villages and harbours, to hike along the spectacular cliff tops - cliffs that some say are the most beautiful and the most awe inspiring in the world, they come to see Cornwall year after year - because Cornwall is different. And when they've gone in September, the county returns again to the isolated, Celtic stronghold that it has always been - mysterious, grey, and bleak in the thundering winter storms that sweep in across the Atlantic.

Nobody knows how long ago the first visitors came to Cornwall – two thousand, maybe three thousand years. They came from the Mediterranean in search of tin and copper with which Cornwall abounds - two minerals vital to  the ancient world. So that Cornwall has a long tradition of human habitation. Mysterious barrows, dolmens and stone chambered tombs still stand as evidence of this. Descendants of the early peoples still live in Cornwall, and that is perhaps why the Cornish are different from other Englishmen, why they view intruders with a certain inborn suspicion. There’s even a movement today that seeks independence for the men of Cornwall, although nobody takes it very seriously.

I mention all of this because I think it’s necessary to know something about Cornwall and the Cornish in order to understand two Cornish artists, both dead, who are now being given their first major showing at the Tate Gallery in London. They were both passionately devoted to the Cornish scene, which, as I have explained, is a unique one, but in other ways they couldn't have been more different. One was a semi-illiterate fisherman who didn’t take up painting until he was seventy – a naive self-taught master who painted on old cardboard boxes with ships paints out of a tin. The other was sophisticated, well educated, acquainted with such well-known artists as Ben Nicholson and the Russian constructivist Naum Gabo, a man who was familiar with, and involved in, the international art scene in the recent fifties and early sixties. He was a man who cared so passionately about understanding the Cornish landscape that he took to flying a glider over it, and it was in a glider that he was killed some four years ago.

The fisherman was Alfred Wallis, the glider pilot was Peter Lanyon. They knew each other, and Lanyon, like Ben Nicholson, the sculptress Barbara Hepworth, and a small circle of other artists critics and collectors, visited Wallis regularly and bought his naive paintings for a few shillings each. They greatly admired him and felt that he looked not unlike Cézanne as he sat gravely in his little cottage, working away on the kitchen table at some new painting. What Wallis thought of his admirers it’s not so easy to say! Towards the end of his life he developed a persecution mania, and he was not always easily approachable, but he certainly accepted Peter Lanyon as a fellow Cornishman, and made him pay for his paintings. “I give them away to the others for the good of their souls,” he said, “but you're all right. You're a local man.”

Wallis, as you can see, was very religious, as austere as the grey and heavy green paint in his pictures. He covered the paintings over on Sundays and read only the Bible, but in spite of his simplicity he had a fair idea of his own significance. Artists had been attracted to Cornwall since the 1880s and had formed colonies at two fishing villages, St Ives on the north coast, and Newlyn on the south. Wallis and Lanyon both lived at St Ives, but I don't think that Wallis ever thought of himself as an artist, like the gentlemen and ladies of the colony who painted traditional pictures in a bastardised form of Impressionism. They certainly didn't understand him. One of them told me, “It’s disgraceful, that Peter Lanyon and all those modern artists are encouraging that poor old half-witted fisherman to think that he is a painter. They should be stopped! But nothing could stop Wallis. He often painted four pictures a day, and when he died in 1942 it was calculated that he’d probably painted some 4,000 paintings altogether in the last 17 years. Many of them, I’m afraid, were thrown away by local people, who took him and his “ikons of the sea” as something of a joke, but those that remain now sail around the walls of the Tate Gallery, sharp dark fishing boats on stormy seas, nets and fishes, lighthouses and landscapes, birds in magical gardens and strange iron bridges from the Industrial Revolution and the age of steam.

Wallis painted “for company”, as he put it, after his wife died. Lanyon painted because he had to, driven on by a compulsive desire to make visible his passion for  Cornwall and the Cornish people. His paintings and his sculptures and constructions are composite experiences welded together into images that evoke a feeling of place. I knew these paintings very well at the time that he painted them, and now I know them even better. I now find figures, half-submerged personages, crucifixions, miners, young blonde girls on wild beaches – things I never saw in them before. And I believe that I shall go on seeing new images as time passes, and I come across some of these paintings again.

Lanyon believed that a painting should contain and reveal different levels of experience. The later pictures are painted in what might loosely be called an Abstract Expressionist manner – so that the painter’s journey is made manifest in the entwining swathes of paint. I don’t think that this kind of painting is easy to look at now, but when the roundabout of fashion rehabilitates gestural art, I am sure that these will be seen to be some of the most significant paintings produced during the nineteen fifties and early sixties in any country. Peter Lanyon’s death was a tragedy. He was a remarkable person, full of ideas and with a contagious enthusiasm for life, and for art. I think he was showing a way in which landscape painting, that peculiarly English form of expression, could be revitalised.

Alfred Wallis once told the sculptress Barbara Hepworth that his pictures were “for other artists to take off from”. A lot of artists did just this. They took off from them. I think that Peter Lanyon’s work is something to take off from as well. I feel sure that we shall see evidence of this in the years to come.

Michael Canney on current exhibition Peter Lanyon and Alfred Wallis at Tate Gallery for BBC European English Service, 1968