Patrick Heron 1920-1999

Heron’s earliest landscape painting in the years after WWII clearly demonstrates how strongly the influence of French Post-Impressionism, such as that of later Bonnard and Derain, was felt by a generation that had been removed from the mainstream of European art for the duration of the war.

Painted in January 1949, when the Herons were staying with Francis Davison and Margaret Mellis at Le Chateau des Enfants, the expressive tension of La Garoup, Cap D’Antibes, is built up through the contrasting simplicity of the composition and the varied handling of the medium. Wide, paint-loaded brushstrokes build up the sea and the distant headlands whilst thinner washes of colour build up the basic forms of the foreground. As with much of Heron’s painting at this time, thick streaks of impasto then sit on the surface, delineating the forms or giving textural highlights, such as on the brick wall or the surface of the sea and give life to this view of the empty bay.

This very distinctive manner was the result of Heron bringing together the various strands of influence that had appeared in his painting since 1945 and distilling it into a style that contemporary critics began to recognise as not only distinctive, but also very personal. Whilst the references to Braque and Matisse remain, the assurance with which Heron builds a composition that, unlike much of his landscape work, offers no obvious subject is very noticeable, as is the fact that by having no major central feature other than the colour of the sea itself, Heron is in fact starting to display the tendency that would become full-formed only in the abstract work of a decade later, that of allowing the significant forms within his composition to drift to the very edges of the canvas.