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 vocabulary of the still life was common currency in British art at the time (see for instance lot 45), but with the richly handled areas of bright colour used to define the forms, the present painting allows us to see with retrospect 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.