Girl with Jonquils : 50 is a neo-cubist painting of dulcet colour and rare pictorial ingenuity. It depicts a woman seated in a chair with a window behind her, which is evoked in a flat panel of dazzling sunshine yellow. A pot of the eponymous jonquils, a delicate yellow flower closely related to daffodils and narcissi, is placed on the table beside her. The composition was planned and executed with considerable care. Several areas of the picture are unpainted, with looping silhouettes drawn in with paint, framed by a margin of untouched white canvas, and bordered by irregular-shaped blocks of monotone colour. The effect is unique in art of the period, conveying a sense of depth and space and simultaneously emphasising the flatness of the canvas and the surface qualities of the painting. Despite their decisive hard-edged outlines, objects in the painting are treated transparently and the girl’s torso gives way to allow a view of the chair she sits upon. The counterpoint between the arc of her shoulders and the round-edged back of the chair creates a visual echo. The girl’s hair is quaffed, indicated by two overlapping wavy lines, and her arms are bare; the skin tone is an exaggerated shade of pastel pink. Though the work is painted in full colour, areas of light and shadow are apparent nevertheless. The right side of the figure is in shadow, painted in hues of brown, lilac and teal, in contrast to the pink and pastel blue along her left-hand side.

The work was possibly made at 53 Addison Avenue, Holland Park, where Heron rented two upper floors as a combined living and working space between 1945 and 1956. He spent each summer between 1947 and 1954 at 3 St Andrew’s Street, a property in the heart of St Ives, and the work might equally have been made there. The figure’s light clothes and the brilliant daylight flooding through the window indicate as much.

Between 1945 and 1955, Heron painted in an original style which combined flowing silhouettes and ungraded blocks of bright colour. He established himself in these years as one of the most advanced, independent-minded artists and critics of his generation, with solo exhibitions at Redfern Gallery, an extended correspondence with the American critic Clement Greenberg, and the publication of his collected writings as The Changing Forms of Art (1955, Routledge). The skein of snaking, overlapping outlines in his work at the time demonstrates an assured draughtsmanship and acknowledges the mobility of human vision. These outlines suggest both multiple views of the same object and the movement of the world around the viewer. Just as Cézanne and then the Cubists explored the partial, approximate nature of seeing, so too did Heron’s work of the post-war period.

One rarely sees anything in its entirety, but one knows the shape and structure of things, and our assumptions help us to make sense of the world around us. In his paintings of this period, Heron sought to communicate not just the superficial appearance of things, but to lay bare the casual assumptions which inform one’s vision. This ambition is made clear by another work from the same year as Girl with Jonquils : 50 – Harbour Window with Two Figures : St Ives : July 1950 (fig. 2). He was encouraged in this project by a visit to the Paris studio of Georges Braque in 1949 (see fig. 1). The shattered outlines and contorted forms resulting from Heron’s stylistic manoeuvres also register a sense of post-war unease and anxiety, and the artist’s figure paintings from this time can also be compared to those of Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde.

Beside Heron, the other great interpreter of Cubism working in Britain was Ben Nicholson. They were acquainted and shared a correspondence, partly encouraged by their mutual attachment to Cornwall and St Ives. After the end of war in 1945, Nicholson returned to representational subjects, most especially still lifes of jugs and other ceramic vessels with a view of Cornwall beyond. As with Heron, Nicholson’s manner between 1945 and 1955 involved brilliant draughtsmanship of continuous flowing lines and intersecting semi-transparent forms with strongly delineated silhouettes.

In 1956, Heron moved permanently to a house in Zennor near St Ives. From this time onwards he made paintings that reflected contemporary abstract American art by the likes of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. Where his earlier work explored the challenges of representing depth and volume in two dimensions, after his discovery of ‘pure’ abstraction he spent the rest of his career making paintings defined by their colour and surface texture.