Patrick Heron

Waddington Galleries, London
Private Collection, Belgium, from whom acquired by the present owner in December 1990

Bradford, City of Bradford Art Gallery, 1965 (details untraced);
Paris, La Galerie le Balcon des Arts, Terry Frost et Patrick Heron, June - August 1977 (as Reds on Blacks), un-numbered exhibition;
Ostend, Galerij Cotthem, Works from the Seventies, August - September 1991 (details untraced).

Original canvas. There is an extremely minor undulation in the extreme upper left corner, but otherwise the canvas is sound. There are a few minor and very small flecks of loss at the extreme edges, possibly due to previous frame abrasion, most noticeable in the upper and lower left corners, with one or two further tiny flecks elsewhere. There is a small light scratch in the lower left quadrant and another in the upper right. There is an isolated line of minor craquelure in the upper left quadrant. There are two tiny flecks of loss to the red circle in the upper right. There are some areas of blooming, as well as a very light layer of surface dirt and one or two elements of studio detritus. Subject to the above the work appears to be in very good overall condition. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals a fine line of retouching, possibly covering an earlier scratch, in the black pigment of the upper right quadrant. The work is framed within a simple black painted wood frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The Estate of Patrick Heron is preparing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the Artist's work and would like to hear from owners of any works by Patrick Heron, so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to The Estate of Patrick Heron c/o Modern & Post-War British Art, Sotheby's, 34-35 New Bond Street, London, W1A 2AA, or email modbrit@sothebys.com.

By the time Patrick Heron completed Reds and Blacks: 1964, a subtle but significant change had taken place in his working method. Unlike the spontaneous approach which informed the soft-edges of paintings such as Squares on Dull Green: Jan 60 (lot 20), Heron deliberately designed his compositions by delineating the boundaries of his colour fields before applying pigment. The forms in Reds and Blacks: 1964 are clearly delineated, circumscribed windows of dynamic hard-edged colour through which the European influences of Matisse, Cézanne and Bonnard are more clearly discernible, as well as the landscape and light of the Penwith peninsula and a new found confidence in British art.

In 1956, Heron had bought Eagle’s Nest, a retreat perched above the cliffs at Zennor in Cornwall. Its sheltered garden, full of camellias and azaleas, and burning bright with colour, immediately provided inspiration for the so-called ‘garden paintings’: large, often vertical-format works that steer a course between the loose figuration of late Monet and the very latest mode of abstraction from Paris, tachisme, in which the brushstroke (or tache) represents nothing but itself and its own making. A more lasting influence was the white light of West Penwith which is surrounded on three sides by an ink black sea that shimmers with colour when hit by the especially clear and chromatically varied light of the region. This environment allowed Heron to create a form of painting that is purely about colour, unrestrained by representation and metaphor. 

Inevitably, Heron’s work of this period is seen in comparison to that of Mark Rothko, who came to Cornwall in August 1959 (the year he was working on the Seagram Murals). He met those artists he knew of and admired, all the while painting with a freedom he felt difficult to achieve in New York.  Heron’s paintings, however, are radically different from Rothko’s formal, hieratic works. They are more dynamic, complex – in both colour and handling – and focus on a deep saturation of the mind’s eye. As Heron himself exaplins: ‘For a very long time now, I have realised that my overriding interest is colour. Colour is both the subject and the means; the form and the content; the images and the meaning…’ (the Artist, ‘A Note on my Painting: 1962’, introduction to the catalogue for his exhibition at Galerie Charles Lienhard, Zurich, January 1963).