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Lot Essay
John Craxton arrived in Greece in May 1946, hitching a lift in a borrowed bomber from Milan. Aged 23, he found himself in heaven, in a land where he would live for most of the next six decades. His deliverer was Lady 'Peter' Norton, wife of the British Ambassador, who had been on a mission to buy new curtains for the embassy in Athens. They had met at the opening for a Craxton exhibition in Zurich, arranged by Peter Watson, co-founder and art editor of Horizon magazine. The two Peters were to be his best patrons.
Lady Norton (née Noel Evelyn Hughes) had co-founded the London Gallery in 1936, organising shows for Edvard Munch, Fernand Léger and Naum Gabo among others, before resigning to join her diplomat husband on a posting to Poland. 'She’s even more art mad than I am,' Peter Watson said. She gave Craxton an allowance, bought his pictures and helped to set up two exhibitions via the British Council. With five loans (including the present lot) to the Craxton Whitechapel Art Gallery retrospective, in 1967, she would be the leading private lender after Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears.
After a few weeks in a billet above an embassy garage, an introduction to Paddy Leigh Fermor spurred the young painter to Poros. This island in the Saronic Gulf, so handy for Athens, would be his main base for nearly 15 island-hopping years, until he settled on Crete in 1960. Lucian Freud joined him for that first autumn and winter – with more help from Lady Norton. But from a first revelatory trip in 1947, the Craxton imagination was aroused most powerfully by Crete, which he had visited to see the Palace of Knossos, the birthplace of El Greco and a butcher in Herakleion market. A portrait of the butcher – met when he was a dancing sailor in a Poros bar – is in the current Queer British Art show at Tate Britain.
This painting dates from the second Craxton visit to Crete, in 1948, and a trek into the White Mountains to meet and depict resistance veterans. After the artist failed to return as planned, friends in Athens were convinced he had been kidnapped or killed in a lawless part of their wild country. But he was in his element, working and partying, and a search party was happily evaded.
In this composition – almost certainly based on the partisan stronghold of Alones – the two foreground shepherds have lit a fire at the mouth of a cave, where their flock of goats has been herded for the night. Following probable rounds of tsikoudia, a third comrade seems to be dancing into the night. He has also shed the characteristic hooded cloak of Greek shepherds. Made from sheep and goats’ wool, the garment doubled as a sleeping bag and lent to wearers, in moonlight and firelight, a semblance of monks or ghosts. John Craxton maintained that a great work of art should in the end defy analysis, to keep a note of mystery. In the lean figures with hands and faces illuminated by flame within a world of darkness, the painter is also paying tribute to a masterpiece he had known and loved from childhood – El Greco’s An Allegory (Fabula), now in the National Gallery of Scotland.
We are very grateful to Ian Collins for preparing this catalogue entry.
A survey of John Craxton’s Aegean odyssey and friendships, entitled Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor: Charmed Lives in Greece, is at the Benaki Museum in Athens from 6 June - 10 September 2017, and the British Museum, March - July 2018.
Lady Norton (née Noel Evelyn Hughes) had co-founded the London Gallery in 1936, organising shows for Edvard Munch, Fernand Léger and Naum Gabo among others, before resigning to join her diplomat husband on a posting to Poland. 'She’s even more art mad than I am,' Peter Watson said. She gave Craxton an allowance, bought his pictures and helped to set up two exhibitions via the British Council. With five loans (including the present lot) to the Craxton Whitechapel Art Gallery retrospective, in 1967, she would be the leading private lender after Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears.
After a few weeks in a billet above an embassy garage, an introduction to Paddy Leigh Fermor spurred the young painter to Poros. This island in the Saronic Gulf, so handy for Athens, would be his main base for nearly 15 island-hopping years, until he settled on Crete in 1960. Lucian Freud joined him for that first autumn and winter – with more help from Lady Norton. But from a first revelatory trip in 1947, the Craxton imagination was aroused most powerfully by Crete, which he had visited to see the Palace of Knossos, the birthplace of El Greco and a butcher in Herakleion market. A portrait of the butcher – met when he was a dancing sailor in a Poros bar – is in the current Queer British Art show at Tate Britain.
This painting dates from the second Craxton visit to Crete, in 1948, and a trek into the White Mountains to meet and depict resistance veterans. After the artist failed to return as planned, friends in Athens were convinced he had been kidnapped or killed in a lawless part of their wild country. But he was in his element, working and partying, and a search party was happily evaded.
In this composition – almost certainly based on the partisan stronghold of Alones – the two foreground shepherds have lit a fire at the mouth of a cave, where their flock of goats has been herded for the night. Following probable rounds of tsikoudia, a third comrade seems to be dancing into the night. He has also shed the characteristic hooded cloak of Greek shepherds. Made from sheep and goats’ wool, the garment doubled as a sleeping bag and lent to wearers, in moonlight and firelight, a semblance of monks or ghosts. John Craxton maintained that a great work of art should in the end defy analysis, to keep a note of mystery. In the lean figures with hands and faces illuminated by flame within a world of darkness, the painter is also paying tribute to a masterpiece he had known and loved from childhood – El Greco’s An Allegory (Fabula), now in the National Gallery of Scotland.
We are very grateful to Ian Collins for preparing this catalogue entry.
A survey of John Craxton’s Aegean odyssey and friendships, entitled Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor: Charmed Lives in Greece, is at the Benaki Museum in Athens from 6 June - 10 September 2017, and the British Museum, March - July 2018.