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C H A R M E D L I F E I N G R E E C E 5 Trapped in England during the war, the young John Craxton was one of the brightest hopes of British art when eventually escaping to Greece in the spring of 1946. He arrived in a borrowed bomber – his eventful life was full of adventures like that (this one courtesy of Lady Norton, the wife of the British Ambassador to Athens, who came to number among many friends and several key patrons). He le behind the label of Neo-Romanticism he loathed, along with all the dark, introspective melancholy it entailed, for the full romantic life in the sun. Ahead lay the blazing light of Arcadian landscapes inhabited by bronzed shepherds and goatherds – and also of long taverna evenings on friendly harbours awash with sailors and fishermen. Or, as this natural nomad wrote on a 1948 postcard to E.Q. Nicholson, Ben Nicholson's sister-in-law and another vital supporter: "I'm off again in a day to an island where lemons grow & oranges melt in the mouth & goats snatch the last fig leaves off small trees the corn is yellow and russles & the sea is harplike on volcanic shores saw the marx brothers in an open air cinema & the walls were made of honeysuckle." at typically lyrical stream of Craxtonian consciousness, with idiosyncratic spelling and lack of punctuation, was a reflection both on his spirit and the six, seven or eight schools the London-born son of a musical and Bohemian family had attended briefly before being deemed unteachable. He was to secure no formal qualification in his life, not even in art – though that was all he had ever wanted to study, but wholly in his own way. He had looked in at a few art schools, in London and Paris, chiefly to use the facilities and especially to attend life-drawing classes. But he was determined to be no tutor's copyist. True, he had learned a lot from his early artistic mentors, Graham Sutherland and John Piper, but they backed him in his determination to pursue his own painterly path. Similarly, the amazing erudition this autodidact acquired was gained from wandering at will in museums and libraries and from conversations with informed friends over convivial meals. He learned most by looking – deeper than most other people, and always beyond the ordinary. And he seemed to remember every significant thing he ever saw. In all senses he found himself, and the art of his maturity, in Greece - making his adopted home on an Aegean shore for 60 years. Lucian Freud, the great friend of his early life, followed him to Poros but le aer an autumn and winter in which he painted some of his most sublime pictures. is exhibition includes two portraits of Petros Mastropetros, the teenage son of the family with whom John and Lucian first lodged. A small icon-like Freud portrait of Petros sold through Christies' in London in 2012 for £3.4 million. e vibrant Craxton image of Petros featured here (see page 49) was probably begun at the same time – though many of this artist's most vivid C H A R M E D L I F E I N G R E E C E Image: John Craxton on Hydra, 1960. Photograph: © Estate of Wolfgang Suschitzky

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