Key Works

Prudence Heward is renowned for her portraits of female subjects, though she also produced a few paintings of men, as well as landscapes and still lifes. Heward painted both white women and black women, but while the vast majority of her white subjects are clothed, several of her black subjects are nude or semi-naked. Heward’s key works fall into three categories: women in landscape or rural settings, women in public spaces such as cafés and theatres, and women in domestic interiors. Most of Heward’s subjects are unnamed in the title, meaning that we often do not know the identity of the sitter.