Patrick Heron 1920-1999
Harbour Room with Red Carpet, 1952
oil on canvas
18 x 36 ins


Provenance
Private Collection, London

Exhibited
The Redfern Gallery, London, The Redfern Gallery Coronation Exhibition: Contemporary British Paintings, 1953, cat no.33 (titled St.Ives Window with Red Carpet)



In 1946, Heron had seen the large exhibition of recent works by Georges Braque held at the Tate Gallery and was enormously impressed by the elder painter’s ability to create space and depth with planes of pure colour, and later that year he wrote a long article on Braque for The New English Weekly. Having visited Braque in France in 1949 and looked closely at Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck, Heron’s work of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s has a very strong French flavour, particularly in its use of colour. The use of everyday kitchen objects as subject matter was common currency in British art at the time, something that is especially true of the work of Heron’s close friend William Scott, but whereas Scott’s interiors of the early 1950’s tend toward a darker tonality with a strong emphasis on the paint surface, Heron’s work, as here, frequently uses flat areas of bright colour and his distinctive network of black outlines to define the forms. This closeness with Scott’s work may be in part, as Heron himself acknowledged, due to the fact that few painters of their generation and outlook had such close experience of the French masters.

By use of these outlines, Braque, Matisse and Picasso had endeavoured to organize their subjects into an unmistakably flattened picture plane where spatial recession was created by colour and thus, in his adoption of this technique, we are able to retrospectively see how Heron was moving towards what he described as non-figurative abstraction, seen most fully in the ‘garden’ and ‘stripe’ paintings of 1956-57. The gradual process by which this was achieved is clearly seen in Heron’s own writings of the period, especially in the introduction to the 1953 Hanover Gallery exhibition Space in Colour. Here he argued for the painter’s gift being the ability to combine the illusionism of space and form, created by colour and line, with the physical sensation of the two-dimensional canvas and thus create a pictorial world in which familiar objects are imbued with a life and existence of their own.

The present painting takes as its setting the largest room of 3, St.Andrew’s Street in St.Ives, a cottage right on the harbour wall, which Heron and his family rented each summer from 1947 until 1955, and it appears in a number of important works of the period. The reference to Braque’s major series of Atelier paintings is clear, with the broad sweep of the interior taking in so many of the furnishings of the room set beneath the view out to the sea beyond the window. Comparable with the larger The Room At St.Ives (Private Collection), dated to 1952-53, the elements of the everyday living space of a family are clearly present, each carefully delineated around the central feature of the eye-catching red carpet. Providing immediate impact and a focus around which the eye ranges, the viewer is carried right into the airy, open room looking out to sea.