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I A N C O L L I N S 6 likenesses were completed well within an hour whereas a Freud composition seemed to take forever. At some nearby date the sitter also posed as a sleeping fisherman in an olive grove and inspired one of the finest Craxton drawings (page 41). Back in England, through six long years of war, John Craxton had painted solitary figures which he called shepherds, fishermen, poets or dancers - but each one was an emblematic portrait of himself. e self-absorption of the young artist ended with his liberating discovery of Greece, and he was free to look around him with intense pleasure and something close to wonderment. Now the shepherds and fishermen he depicted retained a mythic quality but most of them actually existed. Together with naval conscripts, they were to be his favourite subjects and many became his friends – and soon he literally spoke their language, learning the salty, earthy and very witty speech of harbourside and village Greece. To celebrate John's 24 th birthday, in October 1946, he and Lucian visited the island of Spetses - a short voyage along the Saronic Gulf by caique from Poros. ey sketched wherever they went, and the spare and hugely evocative Spetses drawing in this exhibition (page 39) was almost certainly produced on the spot. But, even at this early point, John had established his life-long practice of creating topographical paintings away from their subjects so that the finished work became a fluent distillation of memory and imagination rather than a small, dry act of mimicry. e two gouache landscapes of Spetses in this show (pages 35 and 37) were painted on Poros and influenced by Miro and Picasso. In these transitional Craxton works a semi-Cubist language is articulating exultant first responses to Greek landscapes in pared- down and patterned grids of curved rectangles and triangles. A similar approach can also be seen framing the man, woman and child in the magnificent and monumental painting ree Figures, Poros (page 15). Late in 1950 John Craxton was painting on Poros, and partying on the island and in Athens, when he received an invitation from Frederick Ashton to design the decor for a Covent Garden revival of Daphnis and Chloe starring Margot Fonteyn and Michael Somes. Originally scored by Ravel for Michel Fokine in 1912, the ballet with a fabled setting of ancient Greece gave the Philhellene artist a field day. He created scenery based on favourite views of Crete and Poros and costumes drawn from contemporary Greek dress. He also contributed to the choreography, sending Ashton images of male hasapiko dancers. He continued to draw dancing sailors and shepherds for a decade or more, taking up his sketchbook whenever his drinking and dining companions took to the taverna floor. In 1958 the artist produced designs for Summer and Winter panoramas in a competition for murals at Morley College in south London. ey included figures that had obsessed him for the past decade: boy on sea wall, girl with scarf, child with cat, taverna musician, dancer and Chania and the White Mountains of Crete in winter. Photograph: Hugh Bryan