Patrick Heron

The Artist
The Artist's family

St Ives, Penwith Society of Arts in Cornwall, Festival of Britain 1951: Summer Exhibition, 1951, cat. no.91;
London, The Redfern Gallery, Patrick Heron, 30th October - 24th November 1951, cat. no.23;
Wakefield, Wakefield City Art Gallery, Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Patrick Heron, 5th April - 3rd May 1952, cat. no.65, with tour to Halifax, Bankfield Museum, Scarborough, The Art Gallery and Hull, The Ferens Art Gallery;
Nottingham, The Midland Group Gallery, Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings by Patrick Heron, 1st - 22nd November 1952, cat. no.47;
London, Waddington Galleries, Patrick Heron Early Paintings 1945-1955, 25th October - 18th November 2000, cat. no.13, illustrated in the catalogue p.28.

Original canvas. There is some very minor paint separation on the dark blue pigments in the upper right quadrant. There are some spots of surface detritus in the lower left quadrant. Otherwise, the picture is in good overall condition. Under ultraviolet light, there appear to be two tiny flecks of retouching in the upper right quadrant, and an additional flecked retouching along the left edge. Held under glass in a painted wood frame with a canvas mount. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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This small but exquisite painting, glowing with pure colour between the tracery of lines like the glass of a medieval window, not only helps us to understand Heron's approach to the portrait in the period around 1950, but also how he was able to incorporate this into the wider body of his work at that time.

Although portraits are a small part of Heron's oeuvre, some at least are amongst his best known work. His Portrait of T.S.Eliot of 1949 and Portrait of Herbert Read (Fig.1) (both National Portrait Gallery, London) have both become relatively famous, in large part due to their sitters. However, in both paintings Heron was striving to create images that served as likenesses but which still functioned within the form of painting he was exploring at that time. The combination of colour and line as distinct but interlinked elements in his painting is particularly true in the portrait of Read, and was a feature of Heron's work that contemporary critics particularly praised, such as David Sylvester who singled out the 'anti-classical freedom, diffuseness and vibration' (David Sylvester, 'Patrick Heron', Art News & Review, 6^th May 1950) of the Read portrait as evidence that Heron had developed a manner of his own beyond the stronger French influence of his earlier painting. Indeed, both the portraits of Read and Eliot seem to manage to achieve likeness without breaching Heron's own aim of keeping the portrait element within the balance of the overall painting.

Although undeniably a portrait, the sitter being Susan Wynter, the first wife of Heron's friend and fellow painter Bryan Wynter, the lack of celebrity of the subject allows us to position the present work more firmly within the body of painting that Heron was producing at this time and places it exactly between two of the most significant paintings of this period of his work, Harbour Window with Two Figures, St Ives: July 1950 (Tate Gallery) and Christmas Eve: 1951(Private Collection). These two large and dramatic works demonstrate how Heron was able to use this form of painting to create extraordinarily expressive ends, and in Portrait of Susan (St Ives): 1951, this manipulation of a delicate, almost calligraphic, line to create an image that has a remarkable character. The spare and dry application of paint with just the merest amount of manipulation and the clear white of the unpainted primed areas help to enliven the image, but as the sitter looks away into a distance beyond us, we feel that we are seeing something as perfect yet frail as a leaf skeleton.