I had never heard till yesterday A.S. Byatt’s own response to her portrait by Patrick Heron, with which Edmund de Waal ended his tribute to her in yesterday’s memorial service (nor was I able to find it in the unexpectedly terse entry on the NPG’s website):-

‘When it was finished, I did not know what to think for a moment. We both stared. I had a curious experience of it settling into shape, becoming itself, as I looked at it. The energy, the brashness, the uncompromising splashes of primary colour represented what I had wanted in an abstract portrait by a great colourist. … They were a painting of the writer, of how I feel when I start work, a vanishing, watching body in a sea of light and brilliance!’