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Lot Essay
John Craxton, who had found youthful fame as a leading Neo-Romantic artist (though he always rejected the label), enjoyed a renaissance in the 1980s when in his sixties. Successful exhibitions at London’s Christopher Hull Gallery confirmed that a man who had left for Greece in 1946, and lived largely abroad ever since, never 'went off' as a painter. But he was long tired of the art world when an enterprising gallerist knocked on his door in Crete unannounced and, bearing gifts of Havana cigars and malt whisky, unlocked wonders.
Perhaps the most important of the pictures Hull coaxed from Craxton was Still Life with Three Sailors. It obsessed him for at least eight years and now exists in two 'final' versions – one of which will be a centrepiece of the exhibition Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor: Charmed Lives in Greece, at the British Museum next spring. The image offered here – which itself appears close to complete – is a substantial study for the leftmost figure, rapt in reflection at a taverna table and below a sign warning against the tradition of rowdiness, BREAKAGE IS FORBIDDEN.
Posed in this case by a close friend of the artist, the figure of a naval conscript was central to Craxton’s later art. Commenting on Still Life with Three Sailors, Paddy Leigh Fermor – for whom Craxton designed splendid book jackets over a period of 50 years – wrote of young men adrift in National Service: '… one sees them wandering around Hania, not at all happy at being in Crete, and sad and homesick for their islands and harbours. The look will vanish after a few drinks…'.
Leigh Fermor likened the composition to mystic suppers at Cana and Emmaus and to Byzantine icons, and he might have gone on to mention the persistence of Greek myth and ancient history in everyday Aegean life that Craxton loved and layered into his paintings. The writer, whom Craxton adored, was granted an exemption from a rule that 'my carefully orchestrated paintings should not play second fiddle to words'. So anti-analytical an artist would have endorsed the conclusion to Leigh Fermor’s commentary: 'The picture has an atmosphere of an enigma and such are sometimes best expressed, or hidden, in a plain statement'.
This compelling portrait was a birthday gift to the painter Nicholas Moore, who witnessed the protracted evolution of Craxton’s 1980s pictures (what the artist himself called procraxtonation). He said: 'Under the gorge painting bought by David Attenborough there are another five gorges which looked just as beautiful to me. Then again John could never finish anything. In Venice we hunted for the tiniest authentic fittings for the Hania house when the place was falling to bits. Perhaps he was too gifted – like having a large music collection and you can never decide which piece to play'.
We are very grateful to Ian Collins for preparing this catalogue entry.
Perhaps the most important of the pictures Hull coaxed from Craxton was Still Life with Three Sailors. It obsessed him for at least eight years and now exists in two 'final' versions – one of which will be a centrepiece of the exhibition Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor: Charmed Lives in Greece, at the British Museum next spring. The image offered here – which itself appears close to complete – is a substantial study for the leftmost figure, rapt in reflection at a taverna table and below a sign warning against the tradition of rowdiness, BREAKAGE IS FORBIDDEN.
Posed in this case by a close friend of the artist, the figure of a naval conscript was central to Craxton’s later art. Commenting on Still Life with Three Sailors, Paddy Leigh Fermor – for whom Craxton designed splendid book jackets over a period of 50 years – wrote of young men adrift in National Service: '… one sees them wandering around Hania, not at all happy at being in Crete, and sad and homesick for their islands and harbours. The look will vanish after a few drinks…'.
Leigh Fermor likened the composition to mystic suppers at Cana and Emmaus and to Byzantine icons, and he might have gone on to mention the persistence of Greek myth and ancient history in everyday Aegean life that Craxton loved and layered into his paintings. The writer, whom Craxton adored, was granted an exemption from a rule that 'my carefully orchestrated paintings should not play second fiddle to words'. So anti-analytical an artist would have endorsed the conclusion to Leigh Fermor’s commentary: 'The picture has an atmosphere of an enigma and such are sometimes best expressed, or hidden, in a plain statement'.
This compelling portrait was a birthday gift to the painter Nicholas Moore, who witnessed the protracted evolution of Craxton’s 1980s pictures (what the artist himself called procraxtonation). He said: 'Under the gorge painting bought by David Attenborough there are another five gorges which looked just as beautiful to me. Then again John could never finish anything. In Venice we hunted for the tiniest authentic fittings for the Hania house when the place was falling to bits. Perhaps he was too gifted – like having a large music collection and you can never decide which piece to play'.
We are very grateful to Ian Collins for preparing this catalogue entry.