Patrick Heron 1920-1999

In 1946, Heron had seen the large exhibition of recent works by Georges Braque held at the Tate Gallery and was enormously impressed by the elder painter’s ability to create space and depth with planes of pure colour, and later that year he wrote a long article on Braque for The New English Weekly. Having visited Braque in France in 1949 and looked closely at Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, Heron’s work of the late 1940s and early 1950s has a very strong French flavour, particularly in its use of colour. The use of everyday kitchen objects as subject matter was common currency in British art at the time, something that is especially true of the work of Heron’s close friend William Scott, but whereas Scott’s interiors of the early 1950s tend toward a darker tonality with a strong emphasis on the paint surface, Heron’s work, as here, frequently uses flat areas of bright colour and his distinctive network of black outlines to define the forms. This closeness with Scott’s work may be in part, as Heron himself acknowledged, due to the fact that few painters of their generation and outlook had such close experience of the French masters.

By use of these outlines, Braque, Matisse and Picasso had endeavoured to organize their subjects into an unmistakably flattened picture plane where spatial recession was created by colour and thus, in his adoption of this technique, we are able to retrospectively see how Heron was moving towards what he described as non-figurative abstraction, seen most fully in the ‘garden’ and ‘stripe’ paintings of 1956-57. The gradual process by which this was achieved is clearly seen in Heron’s own writings of the period, especially in the introduction to the 1953 Hanover Gallery exhibition Space in Colour. Here he argued for the painter’s gift being the ability to combine the illusionism of space and form, created by colour and line, with the physical sensation of the two-dimensional canvas and thus create a pictorial world in which familiar objects are imbued with a life and existence of their own.

The present painting belongs to a group of works from 1950-53 which take interiors with still life as their subject. They frequently set an object or group of objects on a piece of furniture before a window, thus giving the artist the opportunity to give both intimacy and distance to his composition. Whilst Heron and his family rented properties in Cornwall each summer from 1947 until 1955, the iron railings and roofs beyond suggest that this painting was of a London subject. However, the reference to Braque’s major series of Atelier paintings is clear, although here, rather than the broad sweep of the interior seen in some of these paintings, Heron closes right in on the still life, presenting it in an almost sculptural format, raised up on the plinth of the blue table.