Heath was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, as the youngest of twelve children. Heath studied art at South Kensington, Croydon, Westminster and Antwerp, and also with Herkomer at his School of Painting at Bushey. He came to Newlyn in c.1901 to study under Stanhope Forbes, and shortly after that started to exhibit at the Royal Academy. Heath’s early work resembles the style of the early Newlyn artists, painted ‘en plein air’ with a subdued palette. The influence of artist friends such as Laura Knight, Alfred Munnings and ‘Lamorna’ Birch brought a change of style to his painting with the use of brighter colours, earning him the epithet ‘the sunshine artist’.