Patrick Heron CBE (30 January 1920 – 20 March 1999)[2] was a British abstract and figurative artist, critic, writer, and polemicist,[3] who lived in Zennor, Cornwall.

[4] Influenced by Cézanne, Matisse, Braque and Bonnard, Heron made a significant contribution to the dissemination of modernist ideas of painting through his critical writing and primarily his art.

[8] When Patrick Heron was five and his brother Michael (later known as Dom Benedict[9]) was 4 the family moved to Cornwall, where Tom joined Alec Walker at Cryséde to manage and expand the business from artist-designed woodblock prints on silk to include garment-making and retail.

[3] At school, Patrick Heron met his future wife, Delia, daughter of Celia and Richard Reiss, a director of the company which founded Welwyn Garden City.

[20][21][22] Registered as a conscientious objector in World War II, Heron worked as an agricultural labourer in Cambridgeshire before he was signed off for ill health.

[32] Heron used that most rare and uncanny of gifts: the ability to invent an imagery that was unmistakably his own, and yet which connects immediately with the natural world as we perceive it, and transforms our vision of it.

[40] In 2013 this highly abstracted portrait was the centre of an exhibition at the gallery, displayed for the first time alongside a selection of Heron's original studies from life and memory from which it was produced.

[40] Heron's permanent move to Eagles Nest above the Cornish village of Zennor in 1956 coincided with his commitment to non-figurative painting and resulted in a very productive period of his work.

[3] Its roots can be seen in the Space in Colour exhibition held at Hanover Gallery, London in 1953 where the works of Heron and nine of his British contemporaries were displayed, which he both curated and wrote the catalogue for.

[58] Drawing inspiration from his daily walk to his studio through the city's Botanic Gardens located by the harbour, Heron produced six large paintings and 46 gouaches in sixteen weeks.

[41][61] Heron was commissioned to paint a portrait of author AS Byatt (1997),[62] and the following year Tate Gallery, London staged a major retrospective of his work in 1998.

[3] Nicholas Serota, former director of the Tate Gallery, who was a friend as well as patron, described Heron as "one of the most influential figures in post-war British art".

My sincere compliments, Georges Braque[65]Heron was highly acclaimed as a writer as well as an artist, and respected by his contemporaries for being able to articulate art from the perspective of a practitioner.

[67] Within the next two years Heron began broadcasting a series of talks on contemporary art on the BBC World Service and the newly founded Third programme,[29] and wrote regularly for New Statesman.