Knowlton Church, Dorset

Craxton described the main influences on his work of the early 1940s in an interview with Virginia Button in 1986: 'I was very taken with Blake. In October 1941 I received my first book by him and found that he endorsed my feelings on many issues. I especially felt sympathy for Blake's attack on sfumato, the popular pictorial technique of his day. Samuel Palmer was of course a great influence [see lots 111-112]. Like Palmer I painted dark sombre pictures with moons and mysterious atmospheres, but these were as much the outcome of my experience of the blackout and the tensions of wartime London as anything else' (see A Paradise Lost, The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain 1935-55, Barbican Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, London, 1987, p. 111).

The present work shows the ruined church at Knowlton Rings in Dorset. The ruins at Knowlton were also painted by John Piper (see R. Ingrams and J. Piper, Piper's Places, London, 1983, pp. 78-79, pl. 65).