Patrick Heron CBE

Patrick Heron CBE (1920–1999) was a British painter, writer and critic whose work played a significant role in the development of post-war abstraction in Britain. His paintings evolved from figurative still lifes and interiors towards increasingly abstract compositions in which colour, shape and the relationship between forms became central.

Born in Leeds, Heron spent part of his childhood in Cornwall before studying at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1937 to 1939. During the war he worked as an agricultural labourer and later as an assistant to Bernard Leach at the Leach Pottery in St Ives. He also designed textiles for Cresta Silks, the company founded by his father.

Heron’s relationship with The Redfern Gallery began before his career as a painter was fully established. In 1943 he saw Henri Matisse’s The Red Studio at the gallery, where the painting was then on consignment. Heron later described the encounter as “a life-changing experience” and called the painting “the single most influential painting in my entire career”. He returned repeatedly to the Redfern to study it, and its treatment of colour and pictorial space had a lasting effect on his own work. The gallery’s own history records Heron as a regular visitor in his capacity as an art critic before he established himself as an artist with Redfern’s support.

The Redfern gave Heron his first solo exhibition in 1947, beginning a close association with the gallery and placing him among a generation of younger British painters whose careers it helped to establish. His work continued to appear in important Redfern exhibitions, including the 1957 Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract: Painting in England Today, where he showed one of his first Stripe paintings alongside artists including Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and Sandra Blow.

Alongside painting, Heron became an influential writer and critic. He wrote regularly for publications including the New Statesman and The New English Weekly, championing both European modernism and a younger generation of British painters. His criticism was closely connected to his own developing ideas about colour, space and abstraction.

In 1956 Heron moved permanently to Eagles Nest, near Zennor in west Cornwall. The surrounding landscape, gardens, rocks and changing light became enduring sources for his work. During the later 1950s he moved decisively towards abstraction, producing Stripe paintings followed by compositions of floating, interlocking and irregular shapes held together through colour. Although increasingly non-representational, these works retained strong connections with observed landscape and the experience of place.

Heron remained closely involved with the artistic community of St Ives and maintained friendships with artists including Peter Lanyon, Bryan Wynter, Terry Frost and Paul Feiler. He was also a lifelong friend of Francis Davison and later wrote the foreword to The Redfern Gallery’s 1987 retrospective of Margaret Mellis.

Major exhibitions of Heron’s work were held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1972 and the Barbican Art Gallery in 1985. Tate Gallery, London, mounted a major retrospective in 1998, shortly before his death. His work is held in major public collections in Britain and internationally, including Tate.