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.
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