Patrick Heron valuation
St Ives colourist who made the whole picture out of soft-edged shapes of pure hue.
Patrick Heron was born in Headingley in 1920 and designed silk scarves for his father's firm Cresta before the war, which is a better explanation of his colour sense than the art schools he barely attended.
What a work by Patrick Heron is worth
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Bio
Patrick Heron was born in Headingley in 1920 and designed silk scarves for his father's firm Cresta before the war, which is a better explanation of his colour sense than the art schools he barely attended. He was a serious critic first, writing for the New Statesman and championing the French moderns to a British audience, then moved permanently to Eagles Nest above Zennor in Cornwall in 1956. From that year the painting is abstract: horizontal stripe paintings, then the soft-edged interlocking areas of vermilion, cadmium and violet that occupied him for three decades. He designed the coloured window for the Tate at St Ives. He died in 1999.
The oils are unique and the colour is the entire content, which makes condition unusually consequential — these are flat, thinly brushed fields where a discoloured varnish, a retouch or fading changes the picture rather than merely marking it, and several of the reds he favoured are fugitive if exposed. Gouaches and screenprints exist in quantity, the prints published in signed and numbered editions. Titles are frequently descriptive of colour and date, which is how individual works are told apart. The estate holds the records.
At a glance
- Born
- 30 January 1920, Headingley
- Died
- 20 March 1999, Zennor
- Movement
- Contemporary art
More on Wikipedia.
Eagles Nest, the garden paintings and Tate St Ives
After the death of his wife Delia in 1979 Heron did little painting for some time, and when he returned to it, the garden at Eagles Nest gave him a new way of working, drawing large shapes rapidly in pen across the canvas and then filling them with a fine Japanese watercolour brush. A series of very large paintings, up to seventeen feet long, was made for Camden Arts Centre in 1994.
He designed a large stained-glass window for Tate St Ives, and worked for Bernard Leach at the Leach Pottery in 1944 and 1945. He died in 1999. Titles that give the colours and the date, as many of his do, are the means of matching a painting to its exhibition record.
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