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Lot Essay
The setting for the present painting is the largest room of 3 St Andrew's Street in St Ives (see note to lot 98). Heron has included the open windows and the view to the sea beyond. He wrote in a letter to the Tate in 1980 after its acquisition of Harbour Window with Two Figures, St Ives: July 1950, 'The feeling of a sort of marriage of indoor and outdoor space through the aperture of the window frame, itself roughly rectilinear and parallel to the picture surface, was really the main theme of all my paintings - or nearly all - between 1945 and 1955' (quoted in exhibition catalogue, Patrick Heron, London, Barbican Art Gallery, 1985, p. 8).
The influence of Braque can be clearly seen in the present work (see also note to lot 98). This is demonstrated both in the armature of thick black lines that Heron has used to pin down the structure of the composition and also in the technique of creating space and depth through the use of planes of pure colour.
Heron wrote in the introduction to the 1953 Hanover Gallery exhibition catalogue, 'This is the role of colour: to push back or bring forward the required section of the design. The advance or recession of different colours in juxtaposition is a physical property of colour: it is a physical impossibility to paint shapes on a surface, using different colours in a variety of tones, and avoid the illusion of the recession of parts of that surface. Colour is therefore as powerful an agent of spatial expression as drawing' (quoted in V. Knight, exhibition catalogue, Patrick Heron, London, Barbican Art Gallery, 1985, p. 26).
The influence of Braque can be clearly seen in the present work (see also note to lot 98). This is demonstrated both in the armature of thick black lines that Heron has used to pin down the structure of the composition and also in the technique of creating space and depth through the use of planes of pure colour.
Heron wrote in the introduction to the 1953 Hanover Gallery exhibition catalogue, 'This is the role of colour: to push back or bring forward the required section of the design. The advance or recession of different colours in juxtaposition is a physical property of colour: it is a physical impossibility to paint shapes on a surface, using different colours in a variety of tones, and avoid the illusion of the recession of parts of that surface. Colour is therefore as powerful an agent of spatial expression as drawing' (quoted in V. Knight, exhibition catalogue, Patrick Heron, London, Barbican Art Gallery, 1985, p. 26).