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