Patrick Heron painting acquired for Jerwood Collection

The Long Yellow Table, 1954 by Patrick Heron has been recently acquired for Jerwood Collection. Originally exhibited in 1954 at the Redfern Gallery in London with the title The Long Green Table, the present work demonstrates the influence of French modern masters on Heron’s paintings. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Heron spent time in Europe and visited Paris, Provence and Italy and had the opportunity to see works by Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Pierre Bonnard.

 

After visiting Braque’s studio in Paris in 1949, Heron wrote, ‘it is precisely because Braque’s painting, from 1940 to the present moment, increasingly achieves a monumental calm that I believe him to be the greatest figure in painting today … His present canvases display what I can only call a complex simplicity and calm intensity’.

 

Painted in 1954, The Long Yellow Table shows how Heron explored the boundaries between representation and abstraction in his still life paintings of this period; and this can be seen in the thickly applied colour and black outlines that he has used to describe the recognisable everyday objects.  The painting joins a 1956 lithograph by Heron, Red Garden: 1956, bought for Jerwood Collection in 2021.

October 3, 2024