John Craxton 1922 - 2009

The Estate of the Artist

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Dancer in a Landscape belongs to a series of images, painted or drawn by Craxton in the early 1940s, depicting solitary figures. He later described them as projections of himself, ‘derived from Blake and Palmer. They were my means of escape and a sort of self protection. A shepherd is a lone figure, and so is a poet.’ ₁

Poet in a Landscape and Dreamer in Landscape (now in the Tate collection) are dense pen and ink drawings, reproduced in Horizon in March 1942. In each, a seated figure appears oblivious of the encroaching vegetation, gnarled trunks and roots. Craxton’s lithographs for The Poet’s Eye (1944) likewise depict tin-helmeted figures, seated, lost in reverie amid moonlit landscapes, or half-concealed within trees. By contrast, Dancer in a Landscape is lighter in mood. In the summer of 1943, Craxton travelled with Peter Watson and Graham Sutherland to St David’s Head in Pembrokeshire, where he sketched alongside Sutherland. As he recalled, there were cloudless days and the land was reduced to basic elements of rocks, fig trees, gorse, the nearness of sea on all sides, a brilliant clear light. Everything was stripped away – all the verbiage, that is – to the essential sources of existence. ₂

This simplification is apparent in the clarity and lightness of Dancer in a Landscape. There is a joyous sense of movement in the depiction of the river, tussocks of grass, and soft shading of the figure, as well as the delicately feathered tree and spidery clouds. Throughout the composition, Craxton seems to delight in the possibilities of mark-making, lightening with chalk and adding touches of green and sepia.

₁ John Craxton, in John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings 1941–1966, exhibition catalogue (Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1967), p.6.
₂ Craxton, ibid.

Christopher Hull Gallery

Private collection, UK 1992

Private collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

I. Collins, John Craxton, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2011, p. 49 (ill. pl. 43)

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Christopher Hull
Private Collection, UK
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Estate of the Artist

John Craxton Estate

John Craxton: A Poetic Eye, Dorset County Museum, March-September 2015, Salisbury Museum, January-May 2016

Craxton neatly characterised the British interest in landscape as relating to weather. ‘Light and lack of light. Light coming in through clouds and beams of light, moonlight, sunlight – we’re obsessed with it in this country, and quite rightly too, because it’s part of us. 1

During wartime in England, Craxton had felt stifled by darkness – physical and metaphorical – and the inability to travel to more exotic places. In August 1945, Peter Watson sent Craxton and Lucian Freud to paint in the Scilly Isles, the nearest practical equivalent to foreign travel at that moment. This proved a foretaste: in 1946–7, again with Watson’s help, Craxton would travel to France, Switzerland and Greece, before discovering Crete, the island where he would later live.

House in Rocky Landscape (1945) reflects Craxton’s mood just before these pivotal journeys. Although paintings relating to Scilly introduced brighter colour, combined with a post-Cubist simplification of landscape into geometrical forms, House in Rocky Landscape retains a weather-washed palette of sepia, strong shadow and dilute turquoise. The composition is one that Craxton favoured. Showing a gable-ended building and a road, or path, sweeping to the left, it echoes the artist’s many paintings of Alderholt Mill, a wartime refuge shared with E. Q. Nicholson and her family.  ,

1.John Craxton in conversation with Simon Martin, Pallant House Gallery Magazine, No. 11 (2007).

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Shaggy Goat was drawn on the island of Poros very shortly after John Craxton’s move to Greece in May 1946. Initially, he stayed in a room above the British embassy’s garage in Athens owing to his acquaintance with Lady ‘Peter’ Norton, wife of the British Ambassador to Greece. Shortly after, he transferred to the island of Poros across the Saronic Gulf. 

Goats formed a large part of daily life among the resident shepherds and they were incorporated into several key paintings by Craxton from this period: Greek Farm, 1946 (private collection), Shepherds near Knossos, 1947 (private collection) and Pastoral for P.W., 1948 (Tate collection). In Greek Farm, the the goat is seen raised, standing on its two rear legs so it can reach the foliage at the top of the bush. Likewise, in Shaggy Goat, the animal which has been drawn spontaneously with pen and ink takes a similar stance. A small 1946 oil on canvas, titled The Goat (private collection), measuring 35 x 29 cm, exists which copies exactly the drawing’s composition (ill. col. p. 91, Ian Collins, John Craxton, Lund Humphries, 2011). Shaggy Goat can therefore be considered the preparatory drawing.

This drawing was formerly in the collection of Michael and Henrietta Gough. Michael (1916-2011) was a highly respected British actor who starred in the Hammer horror films and the more recent Batman franchise (1989-1997). He also won a Tony Award on Broadway as Best Actor in 1979 for his role in Bedroom Farce.

Eric Alport
Sotheby’s, London, Modern British and Irish Paintings and Drawings, 6 March 1996, lot 216
The Collection of Michael and Henrietta Gough
Osborne Samuel, London

G. Grigson, John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings, Horizon, London, 1948 (ill.)

London, Whitechapel Gallery, John Craxton, 1966, no. 118

The Estate of John Craxton

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Christopher Hull Gallery

John Craxton Estate

London, Osborne Samuel, Craxton’s Cats, 19th September – 4th October 2024

John Craxton Estate

Osborne Samuel, John Craxton in Greece, 10 May – 8 June 2018, p.29

Osborne Samuel, John Craxton in Greece, 10 May – 8 June 2018

London, Osborne Samuel, Craxton’s Cats, 19th September – 4th October 2024

When the Second World War was building, in the spring and summer of 1939, John Craxton was having a whale of a time. He was 16, dropping in on life-drawing classes and enjoying the freedom of Paris. Forced home to London by a parental clamour, he was then trapped on a besieged island for the next six and a half years. In such confinement his art exploded.

Having left school as soon as he could, and with not a single qualification, he went his own way as an artist – accepting even art tuition very sparingly. He learned by looking – haunting museums and galleries – and by the company he kept.

The patronage of Horizon magazine founder Peter Watson led him to the influences of Samuel Palmer and William Blake, to mentors Graham Sutherland and John Piper and to his brother in art, Lucian Freud. He was fighting against convention and illness – escaping military service due to undiagnosed tuberculosis that left him painfully thin and often struggling for breath. But through all this pressure, he worked and partied on.

John Craxton’s war-time art emerged in melancholic symbols hailed as highlights of Neo-Romantic Art (a label he hated): lonely cottages vulnerable to bombs, torn-out tree roots stranded in estuaries and, most especially, solitary figures in menaced landscapes. Drawn from life, this highly idiosyncratic art was essentially shaped in a singular imagination as a social animal pictured himself in every guise of isolation.

And so he drew and painted shepherds, sailors, dreamers, poets and dancers, each one in some kind of internal exile – and all of them emblematic images of himself. They are escaping, not into the bucolic paradise of Palmer and Blake, but into the refuge of their own heads. Based on backdrops in Dorset, Pembrokeshire and finally the Isles of Scilly, they are dreaming of further physical flight. They are also models of resilience.

By the age of 20 John Craxton had developed a masterly economy which he was learning from Picasso and Miro, in a burgeoning linear art with fastidious use of colour (expensive and in short supply). He worked predominantly on paper because canvas could not always be afforded – though old pictures bought in batches at auction were sometimes overpainted. This shepherd in landscape, wrought in pared-back blue and black, and with the bare homestead to which the figure seems disconnected as his gaze fixes on an invisible horizon, is a gem of Craxton’s yearning youthful art. He will escape as quickly as he can – and the Mediterranean is already in mind. 

John Craxton Estate

John Craxton Estate

London, Osborne Samuel, Craxton’s Cats, 19th September – 4th October 2024

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From May 1946, when John Craxton first moved to Greece, through to 1967, much of his work drew on its people, nature and landscapes for inspiration. He depicted sailors, fishermen and shepherds, along with taverna life, coastal scenes, local animals (particularly goats) and the bountiful sealife. But a coup in April 1967 resulted in a military junta ruling Greece, after which a fractious and suspicious relationship developed between Craxton and the new regime, with accusations of espionage. The situation did not improve and eventually the artist decided to leave his beloved Greece. Travelling was on the agenda once again, with an absence from Greece for much of the 1970s. 

‘In 1970 he accompanied Michael and Judy Astor on their Kenyan honeymoon, sketching and painting monkeys, wildebeest and lions while on safari. Peter Pears bought a picture of a majestic old lion at a watering hole. It went to Aldeburgh when Benjamin Britten was starting work on the opera Death in Venice, adapting the Thomas Mann novella about an aged and blocked writer tormented by a vision of boyish beauty. The lion became a visual metaphor for the dying composer. It hung in the ground-floor study that Ben used when he could no longer climb the stairs to his former workroom until his death in 1976.’ 1

This charcoal drawing, which is twice as large as the Britten Pears Arts’ painting, depicts the same subject but incorporates the whole creature. The work has never previously been offered for sale.

1. Ian Collins, John Craxton, A Life of Gifts, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2021, pp. 303-304

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Private Collection, U.K. (acquired directly from the above)

London, Osborne Samuel, Craxton’s Cats, 19th September – 4th October 2024

The Estate of John Craxton

John Craxton Estate

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The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection, U.K.

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Though born in England, John Craxton always felt most
himself in the sun-soaked islands of the Aegean Sea. After his first visit to
Greece in 1946, he would rarely return to his homeland, hopping from island to
island with other wayfaring friends. However, in 1967, he was exiled under
suspicion of looting and espionage. After an excruciatingly long absence, the
artist would make his return a decade later. Man Drinking Ouzo (early 1980s)
is Craxton picking up right where he left off. The artist’s hand, practised in depicting
the familiar characters of Greek tavernas, here traces the silhouette of a man
drinking ouzo, a Greek anise aperitif.

Unlike his more spontaneous drawings, this composition
seems to be a more meditated preparatory work for Still Life with Three
Sailors (1982-1987). With the pose already determined, the artist’s usually
bold and confident lines are slightly feathered in the details, carving a path
through the creases of the man’s sleeves. In the final painting, the figures
wear sailors’ uniforms, perhaps explaining the uncertain rendering of the
figure’s shirt collar.

Though Still Life with Three Sailors would adopt a
less naturalistic use of colour, Man Drinking Ouzo already features
Craxton’s prismatic palette. On a trip to Istanbul in 1985, Craxton filled his
pockets with various new paints and pigments, one being a striking verdigris
that would become a frequent feature of his works in the following years. The
cloud of jade green in Man Drinking Ouzo certainly indicates the
beginning of this trend, engulfing the drawing’s subject. The use of lines as
light (a Craxton signature) helps to break through the mass of blue and green,
bringing both structure and atmosphere. While deep pinks delineate shadows, highlights
of bright yellow run from the bottom of the elbow to the bridge of the nose, recalling
the warm sunshine of the picture’s Grecian setting.

Man Drinking Ouzo stands as both a study and an
independent work, displaying Craxton’s sustained engagement with the visual
atmosphere of Greece and indicating the stylistic direction of later work.

John Craxton Estate

I. Collins, John Craxton, Drawn to Light, Mesher, Istanbul, 2023, p. 233 (ill. col.)

Istanbul, Mesher, John Craxton, Drawn to Light, 5 April 2023 – 23 July 2023

Soldier with Silvovitz was ‘prompted by the Bosnian War of 1992-5. Previously he had avoided direct comment on conflict, as on anything to do with power and politics; but in this paintings, and attendant studies, he attempted the art of protest. The brutal soldier in the foreground is drunk on the plum brandy distilled in Serb Orthodox monasteries.’ (Ian Collins, John Craxton, published by Lund Humphries, p.158)

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