In 1939, just before the outbreak of the war, Nicholson and his wife, Barbara Hepworth moved from London with their young family, to Carbis Bay, in south west Cornwall. Initially they lodged with their friends, the painter and critic Adrian Stokes and his wife, Margaret Mellis at Little Park Owles, before eventually finding a permanent home, Chy-an-Kerris, still in Carbis Bay. With materials hard to come by and a limited budget, much of Nicholson’s wartime work was executed on a small scale, often revisiting and refining his pre-war discourses, founded in his associations with contemporary European artists such as Piet Mondrian.

In St Ives, the quality of light and the beauty of the rugged landscape had a profound influence on the artist’s work: ‘with every day Ben Nicholson’s sense of light, colour and space - and probably also of movement - was refreshed by his experience of sky, land and sea, so that there were always new things to attempt as well as tried ideas and methods to develop further’ (N. Lynton, Ben Nicholson, London, 1993, pp. 187-188).

In the present work, the colour notes of pastels, earthy tones and a rich black, speak of the bright light and sandy beaches in the natural world around him. It is not just the palette of the present work which is imbued with the St Ives landscape, but also its surface. The painting board has been worked and scrubbed, its textured surface reminiscent of the rocks and stones and other organic elements which surrounded him. 1945 (three circles) is an archetypal example of how Nicholson blends the dual forms of landscape and abstraction so skillfully in his work, confirming his international standing as one of the most important British modernist painters of the 20th Century.