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A n English painter, John Craxton was born in London in 1922 and studied at the Central School of Art and Goldsmiths College. In 1942 he became friends with Graham Sutherland and Lucian Freud, sharing a studio in London with Lucian Freud and as can be seen from his works of this period, very strongly influenced by Graham Sutherland and Samuel Palmer. Craxton greatly admired the work of William Blake and felt that Blake represented the English imagination, held up in contrast to the 'pomposity' of eighteenth-century English painting. After World War II he travelled around the Mediterranean, visiting Greece for the first time in the summer of 1946 before finally settling in Crete in 1960. His early work of the 1940s was often labelled as neo-romantic, filled as it is with a combination of the light and life of Greece and the (imaginative approach) of Blake. e early influence of William Blake gave way to that of Cubism and an admiration for Picasso, placing Craxton in a much more European context. Craxton rejected the label of neo-romantic preferring the title of Arcadian painter. His themes are of course both romantic and pastoral. However, the combination of figures with abstraction and his emphasis on the human in his landscapes; fishermen, animals and houses fill his paintings and reveal what has been called a more humanist approach to his portrayals of Cretan life. And it is the essence of life which infuses his work, combined with an energy of light and colour. 'e light in Greece is wonderful versus the grey duvet that blankets London,' he says. 'In Crete one has the luxury of excluding light. ere is so much of it coming in that I can just use the exact amount I need.' John Craxton (1922-2009) 49