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).

The Estate of The Artist