Like Corsham Model  1953 in the Tate collection and Nude, Corsham 1953 at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, Three Nudes 1954 is very likely to have been executed at Corsham where Lanyon taught from 1950 to 1957. It is far from a simple trio of nude studies. A Golden Triangle is quite clear in the composition and the artist has been as concerned with the whole work as he was with the individual life studies; there is for example no overlap of outline and shading as one might expect had the artist merely been using the sheet to execute 3 life drawings. The golden triangle composition gives the work a remarkably strong structure to the extent that the lower two forms appear to support and almost thrust aloft the uppermost form.

There is also a sense of landscape, particularly apparent at the top of the composition. In this period Lanyon commonly married human forms with landscape and the subterranian mining structures of West Penwith, St Just 1953 (The Tate collection) painted just one year before the present work, being a notable example. Lanyon had become particularly interested in the relationship of the female form to landscape at Corsham, working up this theme in oils such as Europa 1954 and Judy 1954. Other teaching colleagues at Corsham were also exploring this female form-landscape relationship in the mid-1950s; notably Kenneth Armitage and WIlliam Scott, as were Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning in New York.

According to Sheila Lanyon (who owned Three Nudes), Peter Lanyon made at least 12 nude drawings. The present work has an exemplary provenance having been in Sheila Lanyon's private collection, with Gimpel Fils (who had represented Lanyon) in 1968, Basil Jacobs Fine Art and the Sheviock Gallery. It is illustrated in the first major retrospective study of the artist and his life's work; A. Causey's Peter Lanyon, published in 1971.