Red Painting

Patrick Heron went to school in Cornwall for four years, where he was a classmate of Peter Lanyon, before moving to Welwyn Garden City, on the outskirts of London, where his father set up a successful clothes manufacturing business, Cresta Silks.

After studying at the Slade, Heron returned regularly to Cornwall, before settling long-term at Eagle’s Nest, near Zennor, in 1956. He was already well acquainted with Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and the rest of the artistic community around St Ives, and was a passionate champion of abstract art in Britain through his position as critic for the New Statesman in the 1940s, and later for Arts magazine in New York.

It was the imagination, use of colour and exploration of form of a trio of French painters—Bonnard, Matisse and Braque—that were the most important formative influences on Heron. At Eagle’s Nest, surrounded by weather-beaten natural forms, and looking out to sea past the rich colours of his beautifully manicured garden, it was nature, however, and its ’vast and vastly intricate anonymities’ that lay at the core of Heron’s art.