Animated by Delia’s personality, Eagles Nest became a magical centre of hospitality for the brilliant and sometimes turbulent company of artists and writers that made St Ives and its environs a place of extraordinary artistic vitality during the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. For at that moment he moved decisively, once and for all, from the Braque-influenced linear figuration of his post-war work to a fully liberated abstraction, capable of infinite development.From that time on, the house was to be the centre of his imaginative existence; it was, he wrote much later, “very nearly the greatest passion of my life”. We only see nature through a system of images, a configuration which painting supplies.”The exception to this rule were the handful of portraits he made at different times in his career, most notably of T.S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Jo Grimond and Antonia Byatt, which began with drawings or oil sketches, but these, too, were always finished in solitude.In 1956, by a surprising turn of events, he was able to buy Eagles Nest, to which he moved with his young family in April, to be enchanted by the springtime azaleas and camellias, and to find his work immediately take on a new spirit and new forms. Painting may literally claim to alter the look of the world for us.

“Seeing,” he wrote in 1956, “is not a passive but an active operation all art is a convention, an invention. Heron rarely drew or painted from the motif, feeling that memory was a crucial element in the invention of images: these should not merely register appearances, but record their impact upon the receiving imagination. In his own words, she was his “best and most essential critic”. They lived in London, in Addison Avenue, Holland Park, but for the next seven years they spent every summer in St Ives at a house on the sea wall, whose interior with its view of the bay, and the figures of Delia and his daughters, was to feature in many paintings over that period.These were painted in his London studio. Beautiful and intelligent, she was utterly committed to his work but fiercely independent of spirit.

In her he had found the perfect companion, whose feeling for art and nature perfectly matched his own. It was Delia who had given him in 1940 the small French Matisse monograph with colour reproductions that he had carried everywhere during his wartime experience. Heron worked there as a journeyman potter for 14 months, and the example of Leach’s creative integrity, and his subtlety as an artist with the “power to materialise a concept” were formative of his own artistic philosophy.In 1945 Heron married Delia Reiss, whom he had met at his first school in Welwyn Garden City in 1929. In late 1943, ill and exhausted, he was ordered by doctors to stop labouring, and not long after, Bernard Leach, a family friend from Criseyde days, invited him to take up an approved work placement at the St Ives Pottery.