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Lot Essay
The present work was executed in 1945, two years after Craxton accompanied Sutherland and Peter Watson to St. David's Head in Pembrokeshire and painted Yellow Estuary Landscape (lot 28). In 1944 Craxton made another trip to Pembrokeshire with Freud and Sutherland and later observed, 'I would go out sketching with him [Sutherland], did a lot of drawing together, and talked shop. Sutherland was very accessible. Amongst the many good things about him was that he encouraged invention. He said you've got to invent in painting so much. He was adamant about that ... My method was to go out and do lots of drawings, then go back to the studio and work from imagination. Nearly all my Pembrokeshire paintings were done in London. I worked from imagination and drawings ' (interview by Martin Gayford, 'John Craxton at seventy', Modern Painters, Autumn 1992, Number 3, p. 64).
Reaper in a Welsh landscape relates closely to other works by Craxton, drawn or painted during the Second World War, in which he included a solitary figure in sometimes menacing landscapes, for example Dreamer in Landscape, 1942 (Tate, London). Craxton commented, 'Between 1941 and 1945, before I went to Greece, I drew and occasionally painted many pictures of landscapes with shepherds or poets or single figures. The landscapes were entirely imaginary; the shepherds were also invented - I had never seen a shepherd - but in addition to being projections of myself they derived from Blake and Palmer. They were my means of escape and a sort of self-protection. A shepherd is a lone figure, and so is a poet. I wanted to safeguard a world of private mystery, and I was drawn to the idea of bucolic calm as a kind of refuge' (Exhibition catalogue, John Craxton, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1967, p. 6).
Reaper in a Welsh landscape relates closely to other works by Craxton, drawn or painted during the Second World War, in which he included a solitary figure in sometimes menacing landscapes, for example Dreamer in Landscape, 1942 (Tate, London). Craxton commented, 'Between 1941 and 1945, before I went to Greece, I drew and occasionally painted many pictures of landscapes with shepherds or poets or single figures. The landscapes were entirely imaginary; the shepherds were also invented - I had never seen a shepherd - but in addition to being projections of myself they derived from Blake and Palmer. They were my means of escape and a sort of self-protection. A shepherd is a lone figure, and so is a poet. I wanted to safeguard a world of private mystery, and I was drawn to the idea of bucolic calm as a kind of refuge' (Exhibition catalogue, John Craxton, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1967, p. 6).