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Lot Essay
Study for Dark Landscape was created at a pivotal moment for John Craxton. The 21-year-old artist had just held a sell-out exhibition at the Leicester Galleries. Now, after the high hopes of the D-Day Landings in June, the summer of 1944 reality was agonisingly slow military advances and a new onslaught on the home front from V1 'doodlebug' bombs.
The setting is Alderholt, on the Hampshire-Dorset border, where John Craxton and Lucian Freud spent prolonged war-time periods with the painter E.Q. Nicholson and her family. It further relates to the wild scenery of Pembrokeshire which the two roving friends had also explored when not based in adjoining London studios, and to Italian prisoners-of-war they had seen labouring in Welsh fields.
Completed in a London blackout, Study for Dark Landscape is a response to that renewed atmosphere of menace. Bright moons were renamed Bomber Moons. John Craxton worried that the image was too dark, but patron Peter Watson, who bought the ensuing painting now in Tate, loved the 'gas-flame' blue.
This work relates closely to a Reaper with Mushroom drawing still with the Craxton Estate. The main change between this study and the Tate's painting would be the addition of a mushroom in the reaper-like-figure's one visible hand. Mushrooms grow in the dark.
A dead tree shaped like bull horns emerges from a bush as a live one sprouts from rock. Both Craxton and Freud were brushing with Surrealism at this moment, having attended Soho dinners with E.L.T Mesens, Robert Melville, Roland Penrose and Eileen Agar.
And John Craxton had just celebrated his Leicester Galleries triumph by buying, for £15, a Max Ernst painting from the Surrealist artist's 'Loplop' dove-in-forest series. Its air of trapped flight matched the buyer's mood almost two years before he finally escaped to Greece.
We are very grateful to Ian Collins for preparing this catalogue entry.
The setting is Alderholt, on the Hampshire-Dorset border, where John Craxton and Lucian Freud spent prolonged war-time periods with the painter E.Q. Nicholson and her family. It further relates to the wild scenery of Pembrokeshire which the two roving friends had also explored when not based in adjoining London studios, and to Italian prisoners-of-war they had seen labouring in Welsh fields.
Completed in a London blackout, Study for Dark Landscape is a response to that renewed atmosphere of menace. Bright moons were renamed Bomber Moons. John Craxton worried that the image was too dark, but patron Peter Watson, who bought the ensuing painting now in Tate, loved the 'gas-flame' blue.
This work relates closely to a Reaper with Mushroom drawing still with the Craxton Estate. The main change between this study and the Tate's painting would be the addition of a mushroom in the reaper-like-figure's one visible hand. Mushrooms grow in the dark.
A dead tree shaped like bull horns emerges from a bush as a live one sprouts from rock. Both Craxton and Freud were brushing with Surrealism at this moment, having attended Soho dinners with E.L.T Mesens, Robert Melville, Roland Penrose and Eileen Agar.
And John Craxton had just celebrated his Leicester Galleries triumph by buying, for £15, a Max Ernst painting from the Surrealist artist's 'Loplop' dove-in-forest series. Its air of trapped flight matched the buyer's mood almost two years before he finally escaped to Greece.
We are very grateful to Ian Collins for preparing this catalogue entry.