Yellow Estuary Landscape

Yellow Estuary Landscape was executed during the year that Craxton accompanied Sutherland and Peter Watson to St. David's Head in Pembrokeshire. Craxton comments, 'There were cloudless days and the land was reduced to basic elements of life: rock, 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. Sitting and talking there one day with Peter Watson, I was told that the landscape was like Greece, and this was possibly the crystallization of my desire to travel to Greece' (Exhibition catalogue, John Craxton paintings and drawings 1941-66, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1967, p. 6).

The present work, which is close in composition to the oil of the same date, Tree Root in a Welsh Estuary (private collection), demonstrates the influence that Sutherland had on Craxton at this time and also his debt to Samuel Palmer. Malcolm Yorke comments, 'In these works he has moved beyond his apprentice stuggles to record exact appearances and textures towards deriving art from his own fantasies and his studies of other artists. The plant forms in his works now swarm with jungle fecundity, develop conical branches or leaves like sickles, and instead of Palmer's top-heavy wheat, things like skittles or knife-blades pierce through the earth' (see The Spirit of Place Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their times, London, 1988, p. 310).