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The Virtues (H9)

Damien Hirst's 'H9 - The Virtues' is a 2021 HENI Editions series of eight laminated giclée prints on aluminium, taken from his 'Cherry Blossoms' paintings. Each 120 x 96 cm work is named after one of the Eight Virtues of Bushidō, from Justice and Courage to Loyalty and Control.

All The Virtues (H9) Works By Damien Hirst (9)

Significance & Analysis

'The Virtues' matters as much for how it was sold as for what it shows. It was the first HENI release whose edition sizes were set by collector demand, a model the publisher has used for several Hirst releases since.

From 'Cherry Blossoms' to print

The source paintings are the 'Cherry Blossoms', 107 canvases Hirst made between 2018 and 2020 that marked what he called a move away from "the idea of the imaginary mechanical painter". Thick, splattered paint builds each tree against a blue sky, drawing on Impressionism, Pointillism and Action Painting. Hirst described the blossoms as "hopeful yet hopeless".

Printed at very high resolution, the works highlight the texture of the paintings' thick impasto and their saturated colour, and bring monumental canvases down to a size that can hang at home. The eight titles come from the Japanese scholar Nitobe Inazō's account of Bushidō, the samurai code, which gives the series its structure: one principle for each work. Nitobe defined Justice, the first of them, as the power to decide on a course of conduct in accordance with reason, without wavering.

A new way to release an edition

HENI opened a one-week window and let demand decide how many of each print were made, so the eight works ended up with very different edition sizes. The same approach was later used for 'H13 - Where The Land Meets The Sea' in 2023 and 'Civilisation' in 2024. 'The Virtues' was also the first print series for which HENI Leviathan and Hirst accepted cryptocurrency.

At auction

A complete set of all eight, each numbered 257, sold for £90,720 at Phillips London in October 2021, almost twice its high estimate. Complete sets continue to come to market: another made £76,200 at Phillips in September 2024.

Before and after

'The Virtues' was the second HENI series drawn from the 'Cherry Blossoms', following H8 - Fruitful And Forever in 2020. Where H8 introduced the blossoms in print, 'The Virtues' organised them around a single idea. With H10 - The Empresses in 2022, Hirst left the blossoms behind and returned to butterflies, keeping the same laminated format.

How many of each H9 - The Virtues print exist?

Each print has its own edition size, because demand set the numbers during the sale window: Justice (H9-1) 1,005, Courage (H9-2) 760, Mercy (H9-3) 817, Politeness (H9-4) 1,549, Honesty (H9-5) 728, Honour (H9-6) 693, Loyalty (H9-7) 1,067 and Control (H9-8) 862. That makes 7,481 prints in total, with Honour the scarcest and Politeness the most numerous.

How are H9 - The Virtues prints signed?

Each print is signed by Hirst and numbered on a label fixed to the reverse, not on the image itself. The panels are flush-mounted to aluminium with metal strainers on the back, which is how they were issued; the strainers should still be in place.

Can you buy a complete set of H9 - The Virtues?

Yes. Complete sets of all eight appear on the secondary market, and some carry the same edition number on every print. Because each print had a different edition size, matching numbers are only possible up to 693, the size of the smallest edition.

Can you still buy H9 - The Virtues from HENI?

No. HENI sold 'The Virtues' for a limited time in 2021 and closed the edition once the sale window ended. Every print now changes hands on the secondary market, through auction houses, dealers and collector marketplaces such as FairArt.