John Craxton: A Life of Gifts 9780300276053

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JOHN CRAXtoN A life of Gifts

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OHN CRAXtoN A life of Gifts

iAN COLLINS

Yale University Press / New Haven and London

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John Craxton by René Groebli, 1983

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We must attain a new humanism or else the world will collapse into slavery for years and years. As you said, there is no man in the street. Everyone is very terrible but very wonderful too. Just as life is. Peter Watson to John Craxton, 1942

A little farther we will see the almond trees blossoming the marble gleaming in the sun the sea breaking into waves a little farther, let us rise a little higher. George Seferis, from Mythistorema

Not having a motorbike made me feel like a centaur turning into a rocking horse. John Craxton to John Piper, 1985

Note: Unless otherwise listed, John Craxton quotes are from conversations with the author between January 2000 and November 2009.

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Carnival Horse, Poros, 1954 Oil on canvas, 53.2 × 60 cm. John Craxton Estate

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CONTENTS

PART ONE 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Setting Off Open House Wood of St John Harold and Essie Nomad Child A Life in Art Wild Dorset Beautiful Visits

10 12 17 21 25 33 41 47

PART TWO

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

A Private War Bang in the Blitz Dreamer in Landscape John and Lucian Brothers in Arts Exquisite Corpses Welsh Arcadia The Poet’s Eye Less than Liberation The Great Escape

56 68 78 85 93 105 113 118 125 131

PART THREE 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Spring in Athens Rites of Passage Lucian Again Voyages of Discovery Ravisher of Eyes On a Tightrope Going Native

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144 150 159 170 177 185 192

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Daphnis and Chloë Aegean Adventure Bloody Blighty I Spy Trouble The Sea Change Lotus Eating New Muse To the Lighthouse Arresting Times Phoenix Nests Portent of Tragedy Eclipse of Apollo Into the Ravine Athens of the North

202 214 223 229 237 245 253 263 270 277 287 292 298 308

PART FOUR 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

A Time of Gifts The Last of Lucian Hull and Back Painting Pleasure King of Chania Growing Young Charmed Life

316 322 327 333 345 352 356

Epilogue

366

Sources Credits Picture Credits Index

370 375 377 378

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SETTING OFF

In 1930 Harold Craxton and his family enjoyed a windfall. The professor of the pianoforte at London’s Royal Academy of Music had written one popular song and named it ‘Mavis’. In November 1914 Irish tenor John McCormack recorded both this romantic ballad and ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ – the First World War marching song that soon became an anthem for doomed youth. Now, in the Great Depression, the royalties for ‘Mavis’ were finally coming home. Living chiefly on charm and connections, for all talent counted, Harold and Essie Craxton might have found many practical uses for the money. They had five bolting sons, a baby daughter and several hard-up lodgers; their house, rented for a song, was a good address though crammed and threadbare. But to hell with practicalities when a shack on the Sussex coast could be bought for Easter and summer escapades. At first they travelled by train, changing at Chichester for the Selsey Tramway, where the Craxton brothers hopped into the goods van. Then they added the second luxury item of a second-hand motor car. At the start of the holidays, the family assembled in the street with every possession needed for weeks at the seaside. The six children were as unalike as a bus queue – becoming in due course and descending order: Spitfire pilot, radio and television producer, engineer, painter, politician, musician. They were taught to be individual and intrepid. The two youngest boys (the future painter and politician), baby and luggage went in the back of the Austin 12. Essie had the driver’s seat, with Harold beside her, leaving three sons still on the pavement and no more room in the vehicle. One boy (the one who became the Spitfire pilot) was directed on to the tailboard, to sit in an adapted luggage rack with his feet dangling behind them. The last two (the producer and engineer) were sent ahead, to wedge themselves between the bonnet wings and headlamps – each clinging to a lamp-bar for dear and thrilling life. In that careless era before the advance of child protection agencies, the Craxtons set off in a wild westerly direction pursued only by waves from amused and startled onlookers, rather than by policemen with whistles and handcuffs. On reaching Chichester Essie celebrated with a few spins around

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Chichester Market Cross and Cathedral

the Gothic crown of the city’s Market Cross – giving all her children a lifelong love of fairground carousels. The novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, one of many with a youthful crush on Harold, said that the Craxtons were happy and that, like pollen, happiness rubbed onto anyone who came into contact with them.1 Harold and Essie wished fun and fulfilment on their children; imparting the clear if unspoken lesson that they could do and be virtually whatever they wished, providing they were passionate about it and brilliant at it. Each of the siblings excelled to some degree, though bliss became elusive. Four merited major obituaries; but it was the painter – now the best remembered of them all – who did the family credo proud with a life of supremely productive pleasure. Longing to live in Greece from an early age, John Craxton achieved his goal. Enduring joy coloured his ensuing pictures.

SETTING OFF

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OPEN HOUSE

Leith John Craxton was born on Tuesday 3 October 1922 in London – the fourth home-delivery of a son for Essie and Harold Craxton in six years. The mother of this still-incomplete family later confided an ignorance of contraception; but, as the band of boisterous boys grew, there was also a deepening desire for a daughter. The obvious fact of life at Acomb Lodge, in the St John’s Wood district, north-west of Regent’s Park, was that Essie and Harold were engaged in a lasting love affair whose air of joyful freedom combined with an overriding sense of purpose in creative labour. It added up to an atmosphere where anything positive seemed possible. To have such parents was the greatest stroke of luck in a future artist’s fortunate existence. None in the happy Craxton family knew that in the Greek world a Tuesday birth was a bad omen – as it had been ever since Tuesday 29 May 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. During that first October week of 1922 British newspapers were reporting another dire Tuesday for Hellenic history. In the latest conflict with the Turks, Greeks were being driven out of Asia Minor where they had lived since ancient times; Smyrna was a smoking ruin. A peace conference from 3 October would kill Greek hopes of reclaiming Constantinople and lead to a vast exchange of populations – Greek and Turk, Christian and Muslim – in opposing tides of matching human misery. By the weekend London shared the mood of mourning, as black crêpe fringed every pub bar following the death of music-hall legend Marie Lloyd.

Four weeks old

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Harold and John

Harold Craxton looked like a music-hall turn. He wore his erudition lightly under a Homburg hat, with twinkling eyes and self-mocking expression made all the funnier since he had the face of a medieval ascetic. While looking set to deliver a comic patter coupled with a tap dance, the masterly musician – who introduced the sounds of Debussy to England and revived the early English repertoire – actually delighted those attending annual Acomb Lodge reviews with clever skits. One featured Beethoven giving a composition lesson to a prim English lady whose trite little waltz was slowly but surely transformed into the Pastoral Sonata scherzo. Harold was forever the life and soul of the party – serious enough to be perfectly playful; amused in his gratitude that, after a rocky start, all had turned out well. Essie, somewhere on the scale between innocent and naïve, trusted everyone equally. From a class that no longer exists, she was like an empress who had abdicated all power while maintaining authority through radiant kindness. Lovely in her youth, she grew luminous with age as her large blue eyes and sheer benevolence shone out. She was to have been a concert violinist before falling for her impecunious piano accompanist and devoting herself to the care, and the art, of others. Her air of serenity survived ceaseless activity as wife, mother of six and aunt to all, and came to owe more than a little to an interest in spiritualism. (‘Mummy is in her misteriouse [sic] misty mystic mood,’ John noted as the Second World War loomed.) Her gift lay in looking beyond the immediate – enveloping dust, kitchen chaos, chamber pots outside bedroom doors filled with soaking socks – to a munificent universe. Her genius was to keep the show on the road and make ends meet.

OPEN HOUSE

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The matriarch held in her head an astonishing network of contacts so that by an elaborate process of association (what her future son-in-law called her ‘rigmaroles’) she could summon assistance for any challenge, though not as often as she herself supplied it. She was ever so gently indefatigable. As the dependent company grew to cover sons Tim, Antony, Robin, John and Michael, daughter Janet, other needy relatives, friends, neighbours and any number of musically gifted students, attendants and hangers-on, there was never a suggestion that the last straw had just been drawn. Those arriving at Acomb Lodge – 8 Grove End Road – for the first time were inclined to think the Craxtons were on the verge of moving out. There were stacked bicycles in the hall and piles of stuff everywhere – books, laundry, shoes, bags and boxes of oddments. A flurry of dogs, cats, rabbits, guinea pigs and white mice suggested the trappings of a travelling circus. After one visit, the pianist Harold Isaacs commented: ‘It’s a very strange house. Essie knitted it.’1 Since no Craxton could resist a bargain, the nearby Lisson Grove saleroom snared all. Essie set the impulsive pattern. Bicycling with flowers and fruit to an ailing pupil, she looked in at an auction en route and bought a job lot of fridges – one for the pantry, one for a hard-up student’s family and several for storing under roped tarpaulin in the garden until they found deserving homes. Eventually the captive forms contrasted with the strewn entrails of bicycles, motorbikes and veteran cars, as a garden shed became a garage where Tim led teams of boy mechanics while progressing towards his goal of piloting aeroplanes. Meanwhile, Harold and Essie’s sweetness of temper at all times was most severely tested when the lads tore up the lawn in speedway circuits. With upright pianos in most rooms, as well as Harold’s two concert grands in the teaching studio, the sound of music could reach a clashing crescendo; meals were exercises in mass catering and chatter; amid a chorus of helpers of variable helpfulness (aunts, temporary servants, musical volunteers) there was less peace than pandemonium. Rehearsals and recitals could last long into the evening. Charles Rubens, who lived next door and became the Craxtons’ solicitor, replied to an apology from Harold about the din permeating the party wall: ‘The problem is that the music is so good that I can’t bear to go to sleep and miss it.’2 Early to rise and late to bed, Harold and Essie’s only quiet space was their attic bedroom – although Harold was allowed to dine alone and, in a household big on nuts, pulses and brown bread, to indulge his passion for turbot. At the start of an especially busy day a reveille might be blown on a bamboo pipe at the bottom of the stairs by Daisy Holland, Harold’s former pupil who loved him devotedly for the rest of her life. Serving as secretary and timekeeper, she was also likened to the ‘barbed wire’3 around him, guarding the keys to the kingdom and keeping the king on his toes. ‘Dear Professor, your lesson’s at nine-thirty, coffee’s made, and it’s now twenty-past!’4 was a

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Nina Milkina by Cecil Waller, 1933 Pencil on paper, 48.5 × 34.5 cm. Tallis Foundation, Australia

typical morning exclamation. Daisy controlled the diary and Essie the house, with an uncertain amount of overlapping and unbounded goodwill on both sides. Life at Acomb Lodge, in its multitude of movements, was rarely predictable and never dull. Students had standing invitations to remain for lunch or supper – and, in case they felt peckish between sittings, a trolley with the remnants of meals (jelly, junket, shepherd’s pie, grey morsels past any identification date and a sour white substance giving many a first taste of live yogurt) was permanently parked in a passage by the kitchen. Many slept over; some moved in. Denis Matthews, a brilliant young pianist of meagre means, came for ‘a week or two’ and stayed four years. Other lodgers included Alan Richardson, Noel Mewton-Wood, Jean Gilbert, Ross Pratt and Olive Zorian – all notable names in the musical world from the 1940s. Nina Milkina, a child prodigy as a pianist and composer, was among Harold Craxton’s most beloved pupils. Born in Moscow in 1919, Nina came from a cultivated Jewish family: her father was a portraitist of composers Prokofiev and Mussorgsky, a friend of Marc Chagall and collector of Russian romantic pictures; her mother was a harpist. They left for Paris in 1926, where Nina gave her first public performance four years later; by this point she was growing up on both sides of the Channel. In London she stayed initially with a grandfather and aunt but gravitated inevitably towards the Craxtons: in their warm and welcoming household she became the nearest thing John had to a second sister. For the shifting company of Acomb Lodge, the Royal Academy of Music was a penny bus-ride, or a pleasant walk through Regent’s Park and its ring of Nash terraces to York Gate. The Queen’s Hall, centre of musical life in London between the wars, was a two-penny fare one stop short of Oxford Circus. Still, for Denis Matthews and many others, the house on Grove End Road was the beating heart of everything: To me, as an only child, the Craxton family seemed endless, and in addition the walls of ‘No 8’ were the most hospitable I had ever entered. Pupils young and old, their parents, wives, husbands and friends, friends of the children: all flocked and were welcomed, turning almost every meal into a party. The bohemian atmosphere made the Craxtons the most talked-about (and the most loved) household in musical London.5

OPEN HOUSE

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Lord’s cricket match, 1926 Acomb Lodge is behind the white pavilion top right

Introduced to Acomb Lodge at 14, Elizabeth Jane Howard added: It was a revelation to me, who had until then experienced nothing but a bourgeois state of punctuality and hygiene, and I fell at once irrevocably in love with the house and its family. They seemed to embody all the glamour of bohemian disorder, and I longed to live as they did.6 For all the hard work, recreation was a Craxton speciality. Beyond the music and mealtime banter, guests gladly navigated paths through the garden obstacle course because a low boundary wall gave a view over Lord’s cricket ground in an era when Australian batsman Donald Bradman was in his record-breaking prime. With refreshments conjured up by Essie, summer garden parties assembled for free entertainment and occasionally to assist with the fielding. A cricket net for the boys failed to prevent the odd ball from smashing through Harold’s studio window. This was the enviable world into which John Craxton – the family had a habit of dropping first names on birth certificates, along with many other formalities – was born; a supportive household in which, for all his singularity and travels and eventual home in Greece, he would retain a toehold for the rest of his long life. Although he and his siblings were sent away from very early ages with what appeared to be reckless abandon, they went armed with the spirit of adventure based on the emotional security of knowing that they were loved and could always return.

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WOOD OF ST JOHN

In 1922 John Galsworthy’s five-volume story of a well-to-do and warring London family, guarding its property and secrets down the generations, was published together as The Forsyte Saga. Jolyon Forsyte, the most attractive character, is a painter suffering social disgrace after eloping with his daughter’s governess to rackety St John’s Wood. His secret is happiness. Behind the curtains in his adopted neighbourhood, there is a lot of it about. In literature the unorthodox character of St John’s Wood had already been noted by George Moore in his novel A Modern Lover, where an amorous painter lives in shameful seclusion at ‘Orchard Villa, Grove Road’. His wife is known to be an artists’ model, practically another term for a prostitute. In life, as in art, St John’s Wood was widely recognised as the place where men of means installed mistresses, or where unmarried women bearing the growing burden of vague indispositions could withdraw for several months before emerging – thanks to peace and fresh air – feeling so much the lighter. Meanwhile, a baby was quietly adopted. In what Harold Craxton turned into tales for his children as the ‘Wood of St John’, art and impropriety went hand in hand. Painters and sculptors had clustered hereabouts throughout the Victorian era – the most renowned being royal favourite Sir Edwin Landseer. Like other animal-depicting artists, the sculptor of the Trafalgar Square lions enjoyed the proximity to the Regent’s Park Zoo. Grove End Road, where detached and semi-detached villas had been laid out in generous gardens in the 1820s, hosted a gallery of incoming artists whose houses and studios expanded as they prospered. By the 1920s it had provided more addresses for Royal Academicians than almost any other street

St John’s Wood – Hamilton Terrace and Abercorn Place, 1907

WOOD OF ST JOHN

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in London. At the junction with Abbey Road, a memorial to sculptor Richard Onslow Ford rose above fashion with the useful motto ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’. Fleeing the fall of the Paris Commune, Jacques Joseph Tissot settled in Grove End Road with a divorcee lover, building plans ending summarily on her death. The house was then bought and largely demolished by the Dutch-born painter of mythical subjects, Lawrence Alma Tadema. Over a decade from 1885 he produced a fabulous folly for himself and his artist wife – a sprawling mansion based on fanciful notions of the architectural designs and colour schemes of Roman Pompeii, with Byzantine, Arabic and Far Eastern flourishes. It was the last word in exoticism. When John Craxton was growing up, this bizarre local landmark was continuing the Orientalist theme as the unlikely home of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, Commander-in-Chief of the British Indian Army, whose rebellious daughter, Penelope, was later part of the artist’s wide social circle as the wife of poet John Betjeman. The earliest-known artistic tenant at 8 (formerly 4) Grove End Road was Charles Santley, the predominant baritone of the Victorian age. A line of distinguished painters then began with Edward Armitage, depicter of legendary battle scenes in the studio and on-the-spot sketches of the Crimean War. Next came Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis, best-known for his 1857 picture The Death of Chatterton, in which the suicide of one poet was modelled by another (the young George Meredith – with whose wife the artist eloped, to confirm St John’s Wood’s raffish reputation). The success of that image at the Royal Academy emboldened Wallis to a sensation of the following year, The Stonebreaker. Here a labourer in a twilit landscape looks to be asleep but has died of exhaustion. In 1865 the semi-detached villa was acquired by William Frederick Yeames, who named it Acomb Lodge and made it a centre for his St John’s Wood Clique of historical and narrative painters. A decade later he oversaw designs to enclose the entrance hall with two wings – one adding a drawing room with nursery and bathroom above and the other a sitting room below two bedrooms. The extension was complete when Yeames began his most famous painting, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, in which the son of a fugitive Royalist is interrogated during the English Civil War. He left the house in 1893 but held the freehold until he died in 1918 – his tenants including the landscape artist Alfred East. When the Craxtons arrived in 1921, from another rented property in nearby Blenheim Place, they were answerable to the grandees of Marylebone Cricket Club. The owners of the hallowed Lord’s ground proved the most benevolent of landlords, with a token rent and tenancy rules to be waived or flouted. Harold and Essie named their fifth and final son, born in September 1925, Michael Christopher Craxton. A gesture of gratitude lay in the initials: MCC. In the Craxtons’ day radicalism among local artists was more in private life than in the art they exhibited. Since familiarity bred profitable contentment,

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The Stonebreaker by Henry Wallis, 1857 Oil on canvas, 65.4 × 78.75 cm. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

potboilers flowed. Here Scotsman John MacWhirter ceaselessly pictured Highland cattle in mountain scenery. Among genuine radicals the district had become a watchword for reaction. In Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, charting the June day when Clarissa Dalloway is hosting a party in London, scornful lines are aimed at Mr MacWhirter: ‘Dear Sir Harry!’ she said, going up to the fine old fellow who had produced more bad pictures than any other two Academicians in the whole of St John’s Wood (they were always of cattle, standing in sunset pools absorbing moisture, or signifying, for he had a certain range of gesture, by the raising of one foreleg and the toss of the antlers, ‘the Approach of the Stranger’…). John Craxton’s instinctive avoidance of instruction, and reliance on his own interests and imagination, was forged in St John’s Wood. Shunning the local art school, he was persuaded by Harold to make a few tree-drawing excursions with the associated sketching club led by the premier British Impressionist, George Clausen. From infancy John disliked organised activities and group pursuits, team sports most of all. He alone among the Craxtons never took to cricket. As a King’s Chorister at St George’s Chapel Choir School, on duty even at Christmas, Antony Craxton dreamed of a professional cricketing career with long spells of leisure. As a BBC producer he was to specialise in concerts and Test matches before moving to royal and state events. For now, since trees grew on the Lord’s side of the Acomb Lodge back garden wall, he took drastic steps to preserve a privileged vantage point. When the nightwatchman had passed, he stole out to lop off branches anywhere near to spoiling the spectacle. John, however, would have preferred to live in a forest.

WOOD OF ST JOHN

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Tall, lean and highly physical, the Craxton children were plucky climbers – the Rubens family next-door at Number 10 once watched amazed, mid-lunch, as John clambered on to the shared garden wall, then crashed through their greenhouse roof. Trees were magical presences for him – secret realms ripe for exploration and, in the garden specimens he knew first and best, rife with caterpillars and moths, birds’ nests and dreys of red squirrels. Each uniquely sculpted form seemed shrouded in its own myths. Every evening the lamplighter made his street rounds with a ladder, opening the lanterns and turning on the gas. Flickering light sent shadows of branches shuddering across John’s bedroom ceiling which, especially when the wind howled, seemed to him alive and playing out a mysterious drama. Although he enjoyed fairytale illustrations by Arthur Rackham and grotesque imagery from the Brothers Grimm, the shifting overhead pictures were more compelling than any bedtime storybook. There were times when horizons closed in and everything ground to a halt as if under a grim spell of enchantment. London fog known to the world from the novels of Dickens and Conan Doyle thickened in periods of calm, cold weather, forming a lid over the capital. As coal was added to domestic fires and industrial furnaces, even in relatively airy St John’s Wood smoke became trapped as if in a killing jar. Such noxious yellowish-green ‘pea-soupers’ were indeed lethal. The smog seeped indoors – obscuring cinema screens and theatre stages, deepening the tobacco fug in pubs – and into private houses. Thousands died in a hard winter from respiratory problems. On 4 December 1928 the Bloomsbury diarist Frances Partridge, later a friend of John Craxton, could not see across Gordon Square: Complete stillness and white mist preserve the trees in the square garden outside. Every minute it darkens visibly, the mist grows yellower, until now it is the colour of urine and smells as foul. Not a twig can move in the thick mixture and only very faint lights show from the houses opposite.’ 1 While he suffered physically from the toxic effects of such pollution, John’s imagination was powerfully fired.

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HAROLD AND ESSIE

Generations of Scraxtons had worked as farm labourers, leather workers and shoemakers in the Higham Ferrers district of Northamptonshire when, in the 1870s, they decided to become Craxtons. Taking his new name, Thomas Craxton moved further from his rural working-class roots by migrating to Devizes and then to London, serving as a surveyor’s assistant and marrying a school headmistress, Sarah Hunt. They had five sons – Harold, born in 1885, was the eldest – and a daughter who died in infancy. Before Harold’s first birthday the family moved to Devizes, where his father had retained contacts and his parents took over the tenancy of the Elm Tree Inn, the oldest in the Wiltshire market town. Even with 31 competitors by 1900, the Elm Tree’s yard still filled with farmers’ carts on Thursdays and trade was brisk all week. The living was bettered only by the nearby Bear Hotel, where Georgian portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence had been raised. His boyhood sketches were still on the walls. Back in London Harold’s mother had sung in a forerunner of the Royal Choral Society, supporting operatic stars in recitals at the Royal Albert Hall. She determined that her first-born son should have a musical training beyond her spouse’s bar-side strumming of the banjo. And so, when Harold was barely three, she drove a horse and cart to a Wiltshire village and brought back, for £10, a Broadwood upright piano that elderly cottagers had stored upside down under their bed. Mother was Harold’s first teacher and spur to precocious performance. As he recalled: When I was five, I had my first public appearance, playing the left-hand part of a duet with the barmaid of the Elm Tree. Her name was Fluffy, and the occasion a smoking concert at the Bear. She kissed me in public! The next time I was kissed after this was when I was 15 and gave a concert at the Hammersmith Town Hall; a charming old contralto, Madame Belle Cole, assisted at the concert and she kissed me, but by then I would have preferred the barmaid’s kiss.1 At seven he passed the first grade of the Trinity College of Music examinations in the Assembly Rooms in Bath. The trip with his mother was all the more memorable since – apart from his initial fear that two dummy knights

HAROLD AND ESSIE

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guarding the entrance were the examiners – it was swiftly followed by financial disaster, as the family fortunes plunged literally downhill. A veil of Victorian propriety covered the highly probable fact that Thomas Craxton drank the Elm Tree profits dry. It was said only that he had got into business difficulties but the impact was unavoidably dramatic. The Craxtons were evicted from Long Street – and a point of eminence on a slope of the Wiltshire Downs – to the bottom of the town. They fetched up in a lowly terrace on Bath Road, by the Kennet and Avon Canal, then and now the edge of Devizes. The new billet lay beside the descent of a succession of 16 locks, designed by John Rennie in 1810 and called the Caen Hill Flight, that had been the last link in a grand plan to connect London and Bristol by inland waterway. This gem of the Industrial Revolution was still busy with commercial traffic when the Craxtons washed up on its bank. Striving to feed his family, Thomas tried to make a go of a butcher’s shop, a shoe-repair business and a hair salon, but failed in each new venture. He then found a job managing three London pubs – The Greyhound in Fulham Palace Road, and the riverside Dartmouth Castle and Rutland Hotel on The Mall in Hammersmith. Whether or not this was wise given the Elm Tree Inn saga, it at least ensured that 30 shillings (£1.50) were sent back weekly to the family in Devizes to stave off a further relocation to the workhouse. Harold also helped out by fishing in the canal for roach and perch for his mother to cook for breakfast. Sarah Craxton and her five sons were really saved by the Roman Catholic St Joseph’s church on the other side of the canal. All the boys were received into the faith in return for Christian charity. The indigent converts played active roles in church life and grew to love its music-rich rituals. Harold remained ever grateful to Father Bernard, the champion of his musical education and an adopted parent in all but name. He cherished the humble humanity of a priest who also assisted Sarah and her sons with daily chores – hanging out the washing and helping to clean the house: … at that early age I was troubled and surprised that such nice priests and nuns had to live celibate lives, for to me the nuns were almost as kind as my mother and the priests often kinder than my father. I shall never forget those boyhood connections with the Catholic church and its happiness.2 What was billed as ‘Master Craxton’s First Grand Evening Concert’ took place in Hammersmith Town Hall in January 1901, when the player was 15. At 16 he had a full-time post with the Devonshire Park Symphony Orchestra in Eastbourne. His long association with the Royal Academy of Music began in 1907, when he was 22 – with advanced studies eventually under the esteemed Tobias Matthay. Professor of the Pianoforte for more than forty years from 1919, Harold set his untrainable painter son a sterling example by never

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Essie when young

passing a professional exam in his life. That was doubtless another reason why the testing time in Bath’s Assembly Rooms lingered in his memory. From 1911 Harold served as accompanist in turn to dames Emma Albani, Clara Butt and Nellie Melba and travelled with the leading divas of their day at home and abroad. Despite a formidable reputation, Dame Clara was kind to her pianist on a world tour, during which they performed some of his compositions. In early newsreel footage he can be seen following her on to an ocean liner. They crossed Canada on a private train, but while the singing star enjoyed the equivalent of state dinners in grand houses, the piano player ate in butlers’ pantries. Then Harold found pressing reasons to stay in London. All this time he was also providing music lessons and private accompaniment. On visits to a house in Willesden, the gifted violinist he assisted on the piano came to arrest his roving eye for more than musical reasons. Esther Faulkner, always known as Essie, was the eldest of three surviving daughters of art publisher Charles William Faulkner, whose business was based at Golden Lane in the City of London. Although C.W. Faulkner & Co. produced homely prints, calendars, cards, children’s books and games, Benjamin West, second president of the Royal Academy, was a distant forebear.

HAROLD AND ESSIE

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Essie was related via her mother Minnie May to the Horniman clan of Quakers, tea merchants, liberal politicians, campaigners, collectors, travellers, museum founders and free creative spirits. Among an extended cousinhood, Annie Horniman sponsored George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats and co-founded the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; Ben Horniman was a militant backer of Indian independence as a newspaper editor in Bombay, while his brother Roy stayed at home to write the darkly comic novel Israel Rank – an Edwardian tale of a serial killer murdering his way to an earldom, later to inspire the film Kind Hearts and Coronets. In their artistic Faulkner/Horniman household, Essie was to be the musician, middle sister Sylvia the dancer and youngest sister Amy the painter. All three were also supposed to marry into the security of money. Essie had already announced an engagement to Roderick Jones, scion of a wealthy family who was on course to become chairman of the Reuter’s news agency. She broke it off to marry her musical partner – a Roman Catholic pauper whom her Anglican parents rejected. Harold offered to change religion but Essie would not allow it. Finally the couple found a Presbyterian minister willing to take them as they were, and in gratitude to him their children would be baptised as low Protestants. Formal religion was always a flexible matter for them compared with immutable moral principle and the sacred nature of friendship. To be doubly sure in her choice of life partner, Essie also wrote to an astrologer. He replied: ‘If your marriage is not harmonious I should, judging from the planets, say it was entirely your fault. I have never seen two horoscopes more harmoniously aspected.’ They were wed in December 1914, with the First World War and family fury raging. Dame Clara Butt entered the fray like a dreadnought, witnessing the wedding and eventually quelling Faulkner resistance before any hope for well-heeled suitors was dashed. Amy Faulkner would ultimately wed a penniless painter; Sylvia Faulkner never married at all. Amid financial turmoil for businesses in wartime, Charles Faulkner had more than family worries when, in November 1915, he died under a train. At a time when failed suicides went to court and then to jail, and successful self-killers were denied Christian burial and their families insurance pay-outs, kindly coroners recorded verdicts of misadventure where they possibly could. It was said of the late Mr Faulkner that on the fateful occasion, at a point where he had often crossed the railway line before, he had neither seen nor heard the approaching locomotive. Essie was left to hold the family together – she and her siblings inheriting tiny dividends from their father’s enterprise. She had already suffered her most grievous loss when her nearest younger sister, Phyllis, died of diptheria at the age of ten. Essie’s response was lasting solicitude. Deeply interested in social problems, she early on considered a career in public health and welfare before caring for music and musicians.

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Given that the Craxtons hosted the musically talented and monetarily challenged for lunch, weekends, weeks, months or maybe a year or four, space in the family home was always at a premium. Household budgets were severely cramped. Dispersal became a parental priority when, for all the harmony meant to spring from a largely vegetarian diet, belief in a universal brotherhood and sisterhood, and purposeful creativity, the children turned into a riot. John always excepted, the Craxton boys sometimes formed a gang with lads from the workers’ flats opposite, grouped around the Angel brothers. At other times they fought, with volleys of stones lobbed across the road and passers-by caught in the crossfire. There was an earth bank at the base of the Acomb Lodge wall on the garden side from which attacks could be launched or repulsed as if from an iron-age fort. During one skirmish Tim, eldest and most daredevil of the Craxton siblings, retreated to the roof and hurled slates at a policeman. Indoors the brothers unleashed practical jokes. Miss Judge, Harold’s most narrow and nervous devotee, known to him as Judgie, was their

The Craxtons Left to right: Janet, Michael, John, Robin, Antony, Tim, Essie and Harold

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favourite prey. Books or pails of water were balanced above half-opened doors, to greet the carer when she pressed forward in her eagerness to help. Eventually the aptly named Miss Judge suffered a breakdown. At one time or another all of Harold and Essie’s boys crossed the borderline into delinquency – where Janet followed. From early on – and, barring brief periods of rapprochement, ever after – Antony and John actively hated one another. ‘Mummy! Daddy! Come quickly! Antony is trying to kill John!’ Janet might cry. Once, armed with kitchen knives, the brothers chased each other around the dining table. In family photos through the 1920s and 1930s Antony – the second eldest son, born in 1918 – is usually the only one unsmiling and looking away from the camera. Sickly at birth, he had suffered from pre-natal rickets at a time of general malnourishment. There remained something guarded about him – aloof, brooding, begrudging. John’s open-hearted exuberance, his guiltlessness and guilelessness in doing precisely as he pleased, and a certain androgynous quality in his artistic nature, hit a raw nerve with Antony for reasons no one could fathom at the time. Anyway, separation was clearly advisable. John began his education at a Montessori day school in St John’s Wood, where his chief memory was of trying to hammer round pegs into square holes while aware that they would not fit. A 1927 report summed him up: ‘A particularly lovable personality covers a multitude of offences.’ From the age of seven the Craxton boys were destined for distant boarding schools where a progressive curriculum was desired, but the first consideration was a liberal easing of fees through scholarships or special arrangements (family favours being frequently called in). This led, inevitably, to schools of very variable quality. In 1929 Essie, further distracted by the birth of a longed-for daughter, sent John for tuition with the children of her friends Frank and Peggy Whitworth at Pythingdean Farm near Pulborough. The evacuee’s letters home over several months fail to mention any set lessons save for cookery and gardening. He adored the Sussex countryside, learning to ride a bicycle along the tracks and lanes; he loved helping on the farm with haymaking, demolition of an old thatched shed, feeding goats and calling the cows home for milking as they answered to their names. Primroses, catkins and a new brown carthorse were admired and a sense of wild and cultivated profusion in an era before intensive agriculture was engendered (barn owls swooping over the fields, rats gnawing in the granary). Nests of swallows, house martins, lapwings and yellowhammers were tracked and monitored. One letter noted: ‘Felix is a naughty cat, he got at the wagtails’ nest yesterday.’ Uncle Frank got at a jackdaws’ nest and gave the children pet fledglings. The one recollected trauma was an otter hunt at Petworth, with a crimson- faced Lord Leconfield cursing and swearing at the hounds. As the youngest person present at the kill, John was smeared with blood from a severed paw or tail – he could not remember which; just the sense of feeling sickened.

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John the biker

John was also spending holidays with his godmother Rebecca Birkett on a Lincolnshire farm beside Ermine Street – the Roman road linking London to York. In fields he found pieces of red-glazed and decorated pottery and coins bearing the head of Constantine the Great. At once an archaeologist and a collector, he was very soon a curator of his own bedroom museum back in Grove End Road. As the passion took hold, Essie knew just the man to help. Extravagantly moustached and devilishly handsome, Mortimer Wheeler was already famous as a pioneering archaeologist and mercurial man of action. As Keeper of the London Museum, then housed in Lancaster House in St James’s, he was enlivening and expanding a decrepit institution. Innovations included free evening concerts involving Harold Craxton and his pupils and attended by his family plus ‘an astonishing medley of critics, music students, tradesmen, guardsmen with their girls, passers-by and pilgrims of all sorts’.1 Mortimer Wheeler and his wife, Tessa, made headlines in 1930 almost immediately after embarking on a dig at the Roman city of Verulamium in a valley below St Albans – the big hit being a mosaic pavement with a scallop-shell design. When, the following July, Essie presented her son as a student of archaeology, complete with a box of his finds, he was enlisted to the cause. Met from the bus each day at St Albans, John helped to uncover and clean mosaics and experience the thrill of discovery. He was not yet nine: the Wheelers’ son, Michael, had assisted his parents from the age of five.2 In September John was set to follow a brotherly path to Abinger Hill School, at Holmbury St Mary near Dorking. Many old boys would have fond memories of this relatively advanced establishment in rolling Surrey countryside but John Craxton was not one of them. His school report for the summer of 1931 now invites laughter as it admonishes an eight-year-old for being ‘childish’ and ‘immature’. ‘Lack of concentration’, complained the maths master. ‘One finds him aimlessly scribbling and drawing pictures when not watched.’ The art tutor added: ‘Shows promise – but needs to apply himself more to his work.’ John blamed the unheated interiors and strenuous outdoor winter activities of Abinger Hill for the ill-health that would dog his early life and do much to determine his future. Here he was

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laid low by a first outbreak of the chest or lung complaints that were to be summed up as pleurisy amid uncertainty over underlying causes. As he grew taller as a teenager, he went from slim to thin. Meanwhile, protracted detention in the school infirmary prompted an appeal to Essie and removal to the emotional warmth of Acomb Lodge. Many schools were considered for the recovering invalid and one or two were briefly tested before he went to Port Regis preparatory school on the Kent coast at Broadstairs. It was intended as a progressive school for the sons of interesting people, but for John the only aspect of interest was the art teacher, Elsie Barling. He was parted from the first of his creative mentors on 24 March 1933 – the day Hitler gained dictatorial powers in Germany – when drafted into the Prebendal School in Chichester. Luckily for him, it was only an interlude. As a Cathedral Scholar, he became a chorister in the majestic cathedral towering over the school with which it had always been associated. Choral duties cut annual fees from £75 to £35, and within months they were allotted to brother Robin too. These economical honours were awarded by Harvey Grace, the new cathedral organist and choirmaster and an old friend of the Craxtons. In truth, the school of high repute was at the lowest ebb in its long history and needed all the support it could get. Chichester was already a place John knew and loved, thanks to its proximity to Mavis – the Craxton holiday home nine miles southward at Selsey Bill. He had savoured the ‘huge pale olive green stone’ of the cathedral, the Roman street layout and the medieval Market Cross. The big, grand city was so near and yet a world away from Selsey. Mavis, a First World War army hut with timber additions, stood on brick piles in a line of similar conglomerations on the low cliff above West Beach. With piped cold water and paraffin heaters, the flimsy retreat was not exactly a bargain when, in 1930, the Craxtons snapped up the basic hut on a ten-year site lease for £200; but it brought them a decade of blissful Easters and summers in a spot with views across the East Solent to the Isle of Wight at the front, and green and golden fields to the rear. John remembered: There, in what now seems like a succession of endless, if not cloudless, summer days, I ran barefoot, rode ponies, shrimped at low tide, collected fossils from the Bracklesham Beds, went to the movies, carried milk from the farm (which still had a working windmill), and had family picnics on the beach.3 While John searched the shoreline for shells and cuttlefish, his brothers took to the water – once lashing old oil drums together to make a raft that drifted far out to sea so they had to be rescued. Afterwards they kept to canoes and dinghies that were only slightly less risky. The children were treated to pony rides at a local riding school, whose owner was so charmed by them that they were invited to stay on her sister’s farm near Midhurst – helping Essie to

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John and Mavis

recoup the costs of the lessons. The Craxton siblings now learned how to herd goats and load straw on a truck for bedding. Selsey had been a bohemian resort since the 1890s. The characterful inter-war cast included composer Eric Coates – Harold’s Royal Academy of Music colleague – and Robert Cedric Sherriff, who had plotted his First World War play Journey’s End in Selsey. A raggle-taggle line of West Beach shacks provided holiday homes for the families of open-air-loving musicians, academics, lawyers and a chairman of the Coal Owners’ Association. Next to Mavis, Sunny Side Up – two railway carriages and a wooden verandah with corrugated iron roofing – belonged to concert pianist Betty Humby, an ex-pupil of Harold’s. While married to a parson, she spent prolonged holidays in Selsey with her son Jeremy Thomas, a future British Ambassador to Athens (who, aged seven, had a crush on nine-year-old Janet). Betty later wed the conductor and impresario Thomas Beecham, another friend of the Craxtons. She and Essie organised games of rounders on the grass between their cottages, plus races, treasure hunts, sing-songs and musical evenings. Betty hosted a party on an old hulk rotting in Chichester harbour, illuminating the rigging with fairy lights. By way of further entertainment, a feud was being waged by the two outsized personalities who owned Selsey between them. John and his parents liked Edward Heron-Allen, naturalist, horror novelist, palmist, violin-maker, local historian and translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from the original Persian. Ranged and often raging against him was Sir Abdullah Charles Edward Archibald Watkin Hamilton, double baronet and double divorcee who was among the first British converts to Islam. When the Craxtons knew him, Sir Abdullah was also a member of the British Union of Fascists. Even isolated Selsey could not escape the accelerating national, continental and global tensions of the 1930s. Although Eric Coates was inspired to write By the Sleepy Lagoon (later the theme music for BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs) while standing on the beach

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at Selsey one evening, admiring the deep blue of the sea against a pink glow in the sky above Bognor Regis, the weather on this stretch of the south coast could be wild. During one tempest, Harold and Robin propped furniture against the front wall of Mavis, to keep it from bowing in while neighbouring roofs were being torn off and carried into the fields. A broad green sward before the gravel cliff was steadily nibbled by storms until consumed entirely. The row of holiday chalets was moved back several times, but all in vain. Soon after the hideaways were requisitioned by the army, in 1940, surging seas reduced them to matchwood and driftwood. Given the liberty of Selsey and the comparatively enlightened nature of John’s previous educational outposts, Prebendal School proved a shock. There were rigid rules and beatings for minor misdemeanors. Homesick boys slept in an attic Long Dormitory, where oak-panelled walls were scratched with the initials of former inmates during periods of incarceration dating back to the seventeenth century. High windows looked down to the Bishop’s Palace Garden, extending in those days to Chichester’s Roman walls and suggesting a world of beauty, tranquillity and freedom. Such an impression was all the more potent at that moment since Bishop George Bell, who had witnessed Hitler’s rise to power, was the most eloquent clerical voice in Britain against Nazism and anti-Semitism. He could be observed walking between the herbaceous borders deep in conversation with his German theologian friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer – who would be hanged on Hitler’s orders in the dying weeks of the Second World War. John was allowed to paint in the garden and it stayed in his mind as a place of solace. Cathedral Scholars wore grey cassocks with wide puritan collars as often as school uniforms of jacket and shorts in grey tweed, with matching shirt, socks and pullover – the blizzard of grey presented by an assembly of Prebendal School pupils relieved only by scarlet caps bearing the arms of a Tudor bishop who had endowed their original grammar school in 1497. There was a demanding schedule of rehearsals and recitals at cathedral services, where the demands might include working the manual pumps of the organ. Looking back in his seventies, John wrote: ‘I owe it to Chichester for helping me to become a pagan, but above all, I owe to Chichester a Pauline conversion to what I most emphatically call art.’ 4 Along with Harold Craxton, Dr Grace was reviving interest in early English composers such as Gibbons, Tallis and Taverner. To John’s lasting delight, the organist and choirmaster filled Chichester Cathedral with their music. He also took the choir on a tour of Belgium, visiting medieval Bruges and Ghent’s Cathedral of St Bavo – where the monumental and exquisite altarpiece, a treasure of the Flemish Renaissance painted by brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck in the 1430s, left John enraptured. With blood-curdling imaginations aflame after traipsing around First World War cemeteries and battlefields, and further kindled by the staple reading of adventure comics, most of the choirboys preferred a set of paintings in the city art gallery vividly detailing

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The raising of Lazarus, c.1125 Limestone, 120 × 115 cm. Chichester Cathedral

vile variations of torture visited on the biblical unjust judge. After an initial ‘sick interest’ in such gruesome violence, John was quickly repulsed. In Chichester he went to concerts, plays and an exhibition devoted to a wooden model of Milan Cathedral – a perfect copy that seemed perfectly pointless, and still more dismal since it had taken its maker 52 years to craft. ‘Naturalism is the enemy’, John insisted. ‘The point of art is to make a new reality.’ Imagination had to be brought into play as the true artist evoked rather than described. During choir duties in the cathedral he was dismayed by a convocation of naturalistic bronze sculptures of Victorian bishops – intended to be true-to-life and ending up ‘completely dead’. What he loved most, in a great Norman and Gothic structure constructed over a Roman site, were two sculptures of genuine originality and intense conviction: early twelfth-century Romanesque bas reliefs; survivors, John felt, of a medieval frieze. These twin scenes of Christ’s entry into Bethany and the raising of Lazarus became guides for his own work: For I came to realise, without help, that great art from the distant past could be without epoch: it could look fresh and immediate and modern, and clearly didn’t have to mimic nature to look real. These sculptures became my talisman, for their astonishing drama and great presence were there to see every day, even when the heavy noxious smoke from my censer made me feel faint.5 He contrasted the steadfast sincerity of the crude carvings with the sentimental elaborations of organised religion – especially Anglo-Catholic ritual. The moment of Pauline conversion to paganism came when the Dean, Arthur Duncan-Jones, spotting the inscription in John’s Bible from the Presbyterian minister who had christened him, said that to continue in an Anglican cathedral choir he would have to be baptised into the true faith. John felt a visceral revulsion against fake religion and utter cant. Much later he would discover

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that visionary painter and poet William Blake, one of his artistic and antiauthoritarian heroes, had been tried for sedition in Chichester. John himself, at 11, was pitched into subversion via mockery. The rebel was viewed as virtually satanic when, with two other choirboys, he was apprehended in the vestry feigning drunkenness after swigging from a bottle of communion wine and reciting in slurred fashion amended lines of the Lord’s Prayer (‘Our father who art in Hendon, Holloway be thy name’). He concluded that one of the worst sins of zealotry is a sacrificed sense of humour. He left soon afterwards and in adult life would be irked by claims that he had been expelled from ‘seven or eight’ schools – claiming that he had always walked out before being kicked out. Robin Craxton was also turned against formal religion during his two years at Prebendal School. With a knowledge of chemistry and engineering that John lacked, he expressed his opinion via a pipe bomb. Using a manual on explosives in the school library and buying the necessary ingredients openly from a Chichester chemist, he loaded them with a wooden plug and some fuse wire in a length of hollow tubing from a cut-up bicycle frame – ramming the mixture home with a sawn-off piece of broomstick. He then wired the device into the school electrical system and, when a master switched on a light, BOOM! Smoke cleared on a crater in the playground, for which the bomber was never called to account (boys then were known to be mad about fireworks). The surprise was that he could treat a bicycle so casually. Nearby, John loved what is now the national nature reserve of Kingley Vale and was then part of the great sweep of wood-dotted and sheep-rife grasslands on the unploughed South Downs. Riddled with antiquity, the landscape is marked with Bronze Age burial mounds, an Iron Age settlement and a RomanoCeltic temple. A yew forest, surviving the clearances for longbow staves in the Middle Ages, contains trees possibly dating back two thousand years to the near-mythic era of the Druids. Some were planted, legend claims, in AD 849 to honour slain Viking warriors. Whatever their age and origin, the oldest yews have been contorted by the tumult of centuries into beastly statues – trunks and branches twisted into limbs spiralling upwards and writhing on the ground after being partly severed. Thrown down by gales and lightning strikes, they have limped across fresh territory on new root systems while resembling petrified serpents. John walked here until the war, when the eerily romantic atmosphere of Kingley Vale began to creep into an art that appeared to have sprung from nowhere.

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A LIFE IN ART

In 1935, aged 12, John Craxton enrolled at the only school he ever enjoyed – lately founded by Lord Northbourne in the family pile in Kent. Moving to a farm elsewhere on his estate near Deal, the educationalist and environmentalist peer left behind a lot of antique furniture, aristocratic bric-a-brac heaped in attics and cellars, plus his son and heir, who was one of Betteshanger School’s five pupils at its inception. Word spread quickly and at his first speech day J.L. Craxton was billed in the chorus of an abridged production of Milton’s Samson Agonistes. It followed a Demonstration of Basic Physical Training in which the waywardly lively pupil nicknamed Crackers most probably did not feature. Influenced by the principles of the Austrian philosopher and social reformer Rudolf Steiner, Betteshanger (now Northbourne Park) School aimed to nurture all the faculties in each child for the benefit of ‘the whole individual personality, fully integrated and wholly free’. So noble a goal did not come cheap and, on top of the fees, no fewer than 90 items were listed in an inventory of required articles, ranging from Bible, blazer and boilersuit to cricket, football and Wellington boots – all available from (and many exclusive to) Harrods. Even for Essie Craxton, the mistress of recycling, with three sets of hand-me-downs for her fourth and most favoured son, it was an immense challenge. Betteshanger House appeared to have accumulated over the centuries, but its medieval, Tudor, Jacobean and Georgian profile had emerged all of a piece thanks to Victorian architect George Devey, purveyor of the amalgamated ‘Old English’ style. The theatrical mansion invited Gothic adventure, especially with all those abandoned heirlooms, and vintage wines still in cellar racks, that John treated as toys. And beyond the unattractive playing fields and tennis courts lay the revelation of raw life itself. While the school prospectus boasted a position ‘four miles from the sea in the healthiest part of South East Kent’, pit-head chimneys belched closer still. Betteshanger Colliery had opened in 1928, with second-hand machinery and miners recruited from far afield. Often blacklisted on home-ground for militancy, these veterans of struggle now worked thin seams via flood-prone shafts in the depths of the 1930s depression. John was charmed by their

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Elsie Barling by Frances Hodgkins, c.1931 Pencil on paper, 39 × 29.5 cm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki

foreign-sounding accents encountered on the seafront at Deal. He set about depicting the parish mine as well as mills grinding corn in more picturesque fashion. The pleasure of Betteshanger was being reunited with his old art teacher, Miss Barling, in whose classes he aimed to stay put. His obsessive focus was enabled by a new talent for giving himself a temperature in order to avoid tests in subjects where he had fallen behind or failed to study at all. The English teacher observed that he wrote in ‘Anglo-Craxton’ – and, then and ever after, the wonderful cards and letters he penned as comic and caustic flights of consciousness lacked brakes of punctuation and checks on spelling. A games master’s report noted in terse bewilderment: ‘Poor, but he doesn’t seem to be attracted to cricket.’ Integration was never a Craxton concern. Elsie Barling had modernist sympathies and artistic talent. She spent school holidays painting in Spain, the South of France or Britain’s Celtic edges, often with the New Zealander Frances Hodgkins; but she concealed her work from her pupils so as not to damage development of personal styles by imitation. Instead reproductions of revolutionary images by Picasso and Matisse were used to extol an art of exploration resting on endless practice in drawing. For the rest of his life John would have sketching materials in his pockets when not in his hands. He kept in touch with Miss Barling, visiting her in retirement in Dorset. The art tutor was a friend of Vladimir Polunin, the Moscow-born artist, teacher and designer who had painted sets for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes – most notably Le Tricorne, as designed by Picasso, in 1919. He talked at Betteshanger on how art, music and dance could be magically combined. Barling contacts may also have led to John’s being lured from the art room for dance sessions guided by Margaret Morris, partner of Scottish Colourist painter John Duncan Fergusson and trailblazer in Britain of the Isadora Duncan technique of free movement in white Greek tunics and on sun-bronzed bare feet. Some boys became besotted with a dance style also taught in London by Aunt Sylvia but John, for all his lithe physique and natural rhythm, preferred the challenge of capturing forever a moment of motion on paper or canvas. Essie must have been relieved that, even with John’s insulation in the

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private world of his imagination, he was invited to spend holidays with classmates, thus cutting bills and tensions at home. Harry Hawker, from the aviation family, took him to Elizabethan Wamil Hall in Suffolk. Viscount (Richard) Boyle led him to the ‘servanted stiffness’ of a house belonging to a brutish relation near Reading since his Raj-focused parents were ‘preoccupied with their racehorses in Bangalore’. The Boyle yacht did once put into Dover harbour, where John suffered instant seasickness. The affliction would long cloud his travels. In March 1936 Hitler marked a third year of power in Germany by occupying the Rhineland, in a contravention of the Treaty of Versailles that went unchallenged and encouraged all the aggression to come. Betteshanger, like the rest of Britain, remained haunted by the First World War rather than alert to present threats. The headmaster had lost a leg in the conflict, and his harrowed figure now showed an unnerving interest in the perfect bodies of pubescent boys exposed while bathing. The pupils learned to race through cold dips – with John at the end of the line after working out that the bathwater was least icy for the last boy in. For the Armistice Service that November John had to sing solo Hubert Parry’s anthem ‘Jerusalem’, to words by William Blake, in Northbourne church, and he never forgot the terror of it. The boys were drilled in the fact that, in November 1914, Rupert Brooke had penned his sonnet ‘The Soldier’ after attending an army camp at Betteshanger – with the prophecy in its famous opening section realised by April 1915, when the poetic face of patriotic England was buried on the Greek island of Skyros, having died of blood poisoning from an insect bite while en route to the Dardanelles: If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. A symbol of sacrifice and martyrdom was to be portrayed on the walls of the school chapel, via frescoes illustrating the life and death of Kent saint Thomas Becket. All the boys depicted the Archbishop of Canterbury’s 1170 murder, and drawings by pupils Craxton and Whately-Smith were then merged into a single design. John directed a team in painting a large scene behind the altar of the troublesome priest being set upon by sword-wielding knights of Henry III. It was the only image of violence he ever executed. Miss Barling ensured that the work of her star pupil was prominent in art shows – with 15 paintings and linocuts among a Betteshanger School display in London’s Bloomsbury Gallery opened, in November 1935, by the lately retired Slade Professor of Fine Art, Henry Tonks. Poised to be only the second living artist with a Tate retrospective exhibition, the veteran painter-tutor pointedly observed: ‘There is a lot of promise here. But that isn’t everything. Some who show the least promise later run off with the laurels.’ John

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The death of Thomas Becket mural, Betteshanger School, Kent

weighed those wise words lightly against the solidity of the money from his first sale, plus a cut-out-and-kept review from a now-unknown newspaper: John Craxton is at once the most prolific and the finest artist. True, John is 13. His studies of Alkham Village, of a timbered interior, and of garden and coast scenes, have the strength and maturity of a finished artist. The last phrase was picked up by Aunt Sylvia. She wrote to Aunt Amy of being ‘most impressed with John’s paintings – some of them are quite lovely’. But: There has been quite a sensation about John’s work in all the papers – but I hope to God they keep it from him – otherwise they will finish him. I have dropped a hint to both Essie & Harold – I hope it will sink in – I doubt it though. Apart from his art teacher, Betteshanger left an indelible mark through passing friendship with two pupils. Artist’s son Christopher Kennington invited John on family outings to an Italian restaurant in Dover for a first taste of the Mediterranean: olives, anchovies, garlic. Over weekends at the Kennington house in Oxfordshire, his drawings won praise from an ideal role model.

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Breaking with an era of the archaic, heroic and symbolic in art – and a striving for poetic effect more likely to produce bombast and bathos – Eric Kennington depicted people as they were and are. Injured on the Western Front in 1915, while serving with the Kensington Battalion of the London Regiment, he painted through a long convalescence. The Kensingtons at Laventie shows nine sorely tested and infinitely individual soldiers resting in a wintry ruin. Naming and describing each figure in working notes, and placing himself among them, he produced his shiningly humane study by painting in reverse on glass and picking out metallic elements in gold. An image of shattering modernity reflected medieval stained-glass windows, Orthodox icons and Uccello’s panel from The Battle of San Romano on view in the National Gallery (and hung in reproduction in Betteshanger School). John admired the technical invention and emotional charge of an art that ‘made heroes of ordinary people’ and portfolios of figure sketches that were works of art in themselves. They were all the more impressive as milestones on a journey since by this point their maker had advanced to sculpture. Eric Kennington travelled in the Middle East and resulting drawings illustrated Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the soldierly memoir of his friend T.E. Lawrence. The tortured champion of Arabism died in a Dorset motorcycle crash in 1935, and Kennington carved his memorial for St Martin’s Church, Wareham. An affecting effigy in Arab clothing – ironic echo of a medieval crusader – began with members of the public being invited to chip a stone block in return for a donation. The recumbent figure was largely formed when the sculptor turned around in his studio to find John ready with mallet and chisel as if to aim a blow at the head. It was an early example of a lifelong love of jokes and wind-ups that brought unending trouble: the joker and trickster never learned. This time, forgiveness followed furore.

The Kensingtons at Laventie by Eric Kennington, 1915 Oil on glass, 139.7 × 152.4 cm. Imperial War Museums

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The sculptor was also at work on a tombstone for artist-gardener Arthur Dacres Rendall in the Suffolk coastal village of Walberswick. By way of thanks the Kenningtons were loaned the late artist’s Eastwood cottage for a summer break. John went too. They took long walks to explore an area of extravagant church adornment in the Middle Ages followed by seventeenth-century iconoclasm. A medieval rood screen in Southwold church retained its stature despite Puritan defacement; the beautiful shell of Blythburgh church, whose ceiling angels flew too high for downing, had been a cause célèbre for William Morris in his belief that restoring meant ruining when it went beyond merest repair. Very often, John concluded, taking the Morris dictum further, it was better to leave well alone and admire the romantic nature of decay. The second Betteshanger pupil to prove of inestimable value was Robin Oliver. Visiting Robin’s family home in Scotland, John fell for the glamour of his father, Mark – a painter, collector and dealer in Old Masters. He was introduced to the work of Stravinsky via a gramophone recording of Petrushka, playing it endlessly and entering a new world. Music at Acomb Lodge had stopped at Debussy and Ravel, but when John told his parents of his discovery Harold bought three tickets for the next London production of the Stravinsky ballet. They all loved it. At the Oliver house he could examine a treasury of historic pictures, including a Rembrandt oil and both a drawing and painting by a Cretan icon painter turned disciple of Titian in Venice turned leading light in the Spanish Renaissance: Doménikos Theotokópoulos, or El Greco. Here was a painter who emerged from medievalism to become a precursor for modernism. The sketch of St Matthew or St John the Evangelist with an Angel was a lambent aid to study. The painting was a revelation. Created in Toledo in the 1580s, An Allegory (Fábula) depicts a boy lighting a taper, between the huddled and shadowy figures of a rapt monkey and grinning man. There has long been speculation about a moralising message: the monkey may stand for vice, the man for folly and the flame for passion kindled in an innocent. John was relieved that no definitive conclusion has ever been reached. He felt that to maintain the allure of a masterpiece an artwork must keep an element of mystery: solve the enigma, kill the magic. This conviction, formed so early, left him with a lifelong aversion to the pronouncements of art academics and critics – although he delighted in correcting their errors. El Greco was always to be his favourite artist. In the summer of 1937, when he was 14, John expected his holiday highlight to be the Walberswick trip with the Kenningtons – all the more so since he had dropped flaming plasticine on to a knee during a modelling exercise and, in an era before antibiotics, the wound festered. Finally fit enough for the novelty of a first journey to France, he was seasick on the Dover to Calais ferry. He was bound for a boy scout rally on an island in the Seine, to which Betteshanger School sent a detachment. A regime

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An Allegory (Fábula) by El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), c.1580–5 Oil on canvas, 67.3 × 88.6 cm. National Gallery of Scotland

of organised outdoor pursuits did not allow for sketching in solitude, so mutiny could have been in store. Rescue came in the form of Mark Oliver, at the wheel of a swish car – picking up his son and John and speeding them to Paris. They were off to the International Exhibition of Art and Technology in Modern Life, with only one national pavilion in mind. Opened in May, the exhibition was meant to promote creative bonds and celebrate contemporary life in the machine age; but it had been subverted by the totalitarian rivalry between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Spain had missed the party and the programme. Since civil war had broken out the previous July, when General Franco led a rebellion against the Spanish Republic and its Popular Front government, foreign exhibitions were low on the agenda in beleaguered Madrid. After massed civilian casualties, especially in the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on 26 April by German and Italian aeroplanes, there was a late drive for an artist-led display to publicise the plight of the Spanish people and the democratic cause. The Spanish Pavilion duly opened on 12 July. Two British boy scouts were among the first visitors. To the end of his life John Craxton kept sharp memories of Alexander Calder’s Mercury Fountain, Joan Miró’s now-lost mural and the Guernica painting that Picasso had completed in his Paris studio on 4 June. This stupendous denunciation of civilian slaughter drew on medieval Catalan frescoes, Goya’s The Disasters of War etchings and representations of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents by Poussin, Rubens and Guido Reni, and then added beastly iconography – bull, bird, horse – that was pure Picasso. All the anguish and agony in the human procession is expressed in the screaming equine figure at the centre of the picture. But John said:

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What I remember of Guernica is not so much the violence and the tragedy but the marvellous architecture of it. It had this wonderful symphonic sense. Everything was contained within the room of the canvas, just like a Titian … There’s not a line wasted or out of place. And there was no sense of brushwork; I was already aware of the false admiration of ‘beautiful passages of paint’. You shouldn’t be aware of the construction. The point is the emotional impact. As John recalled, the Spanish Pavilion had consisted of Calder, Picasso and Miró masterworks alone – and he recollected the vast Miró mural as ‘the great painting of The Reaper’ rather than by its alternative title, Catalan Peasant in Revolt. He had missed the propagandist element entirely – failing to register huge photo-collages at the pavilion entrance proclaiming the sufferings of the Spanish people in war and their achievements in peace. From a day of amazement in Paris he would remember a first taste of fresh pineapple juice, a nosebleed in a bank, and an exhibition with works by the Belgian expressionist Constant Permeke, Matisse and Raoul Dufy – the last of these a high note for a dazzling picture of a red combine harvester in a golden cornfield. All that was painful and political passed him by. Friendship with the Olivers ended abruptly. On a last visit to the house in Scotland John asked his host over dinner: ‘Which side do you support in the Spanish Civil War?’ He assumed that a nettled silence meant backing for Franco when it might have been irritation at such a gauche question after the trip to Paris. Or perhaps it was annoyance over the muddling of art and politics. John himself, hating the carnage of war, was horrified by reports of Republican destruction of church art. Then and always he was disinclined to take sides, preferring to assert the independence of the artist as the best safeguard for civilisation and the only course for himself. But it was innocence that got him into hot water, then and after, and left him baffled when Mark Oliver drove him to the train for an early and final exit. At this stage he was invited to the palatial home of one of Harold’s piano pupils – who had posed with her sisters and parents for Raoul Dufy’s The Kessler Family on Horseback. Her parents, both from Dutch oil dynasties, collected pictures by Van Gogh, Degas, Modigliani, Matisse and Picasso among others, which John was allowed to inspect at leisure. His own work was praised and his ambitions encouraged.

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WILD DORSET

After a summer of painterly discovery, John had to return to school while wanting only to paint. Reluctantly he joined his brother Robin at the new Clayesmore School in the Dorset village of Iwerne Minster near Blandford Forum. This was another progressive establishment, and so ahead of itself that the first intake of boys chose between sport and construction work – by the latter manual labour, fee-paying pupils helped to build, wire and fence the school for free. Robin Craxton was in his element, gaining valuable training for his future career as an electrical engineer. John saw both exercise options as a total waste of time. Falling in love forever with the ancient landscapes of Cranborne Chase – the chalk plateau spanning 150,000 undulating acres of Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire – he lasted at the emerging public school for barely an autumn term. The school register praised ‘a promising artist and charming boy’ before bad blood set in. He was beaten for handing out biscuits without a regulatory queue – punished, as he saw it, for using his initiative. ‘What did I learn there? That you can’t learn anything from that sort of school.’ At Clayesmore, on his fifteenth birthday, he completed a painting of an ornamental fountain in the school grounds; but then was confined to the infirmary with chicken pox. The matron, fearful for a pending holiday, scraped the spots with a knife to speed recovery. The result was a septic back and cause for the injured party to be reclaimed by Essie. Matron said she had been bitten during her knife attack; John said he wished the idea had occurred to him at the time. One foggy day, much later, he was riding his motorbike in Dorset when he saw the Clayesmore sign and took a sudden detour. ‘I drove all over the lawn, making skid-marks everywhere’, he said with satisfaction. ‘I saw white faces in the windows before I made for the hills.’ Clayesmore appealed to Essie because there were now family connections in the neighbourhood. After her sister Amy married Cecil ‘Bim’ Waller in 1934, she helped the two artists raise £40 to buy a cottage in the Minchington valley north of Blandford and deep in Cranborne Chase. The seventeenth-century house of timeless romance and no modern amenities became John’s second home. Facing a similar dwelling across a kitchen garden, Dingley Dell had grown organically from a landscape to which it seemed to be slowly returning. It was made of local reeds and chalk dug from nearby downs. The soft chalk

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Bim and Amy at Minchington

was bound with clay and chopped straw, to form ‘cob’ for thick, uneven walls, protected from the wet with stone foundations and overhanging eaves of the thatched roof. Inside there was one downstairs room with a kitchen range in a large open fireplace, two small upstairs bedrooms and a lean-to, rat-ridden shed tacked on one end. A lane was accessed via a plank over the River Winterbourne – a stream ranging from trickle to torrent and fed by springs bubbling under, and sometimes over, the sitting-room floor. Born in 1899, Amy died when she was almost 101 – her life covering one entire century and touching two more. As the visual artist in the Faulkner family, and with the force of character never to concede defeat in any struggle with adversity or a contrary opinion, she was a huge influence on John. He wrote for her funeral: She was for me a partner in Art, a conspirator. At times when close relatives thought I ought to get a decent job, learn to play cricket, or do something useful, she was always on hand to offer moral support. She understood painting and painters. Amy’s doughty determination, which John inherited, disallowed the notion that life should be made easier by embracing fashion, material comfort and aesthetic or ethical compromise. Short cuts were disdained, difficulties practically demanded if enabling a quality of life that had nothing to do with prevailing living standards or worldly ambition. Once a teacher friend called at Minchington on his way to a job interview at a more prestigious school. ‘Why leave a perfectly good post?’ Amy thundered. ‘There comes a time in life when one needs to get on’, the teacher said. ‘GET ON?’ Amy cried. ‘You should GET OFF!’ While aware that stoicism, improvisation and humour are the arts of life, Amy was hypercritical. Of D.H. Lawrence, she said: ‘I sat next to him once. Horrible scratchy tweed suit, squeaky voice, dirty fingernails, awful wife.’ Her hard judgements were harshest as applied to herself: when she gave up

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painting without explanation, John perceived a thwarting by impossibly high standards. But she retained intense belief in the art of her husband and nephew. The Waller dwelling in all its hard-won decrepitude, and its weed-stricken garden that would eventually be recognised as a nature reserve, stood for the owners’ austerely beautiful philosophy of paramount independence and next-to-nature art. As John recalled: What was, when they moved in, a very primitive cottage inspired them to work hard to make it more so. Out went the reasonably efficient Victorian kitchen range in order to expose the splendid great fireplace with its original oven. Beams were exposed, layers of wallpaper were scraped off, partitions removed. The natural grace of the original cottage was a marvel … Of course the beams were lethal for tall people and the open fireplace smoked horribly. Amy and Bim’s lungs must have been kippered. There was no electricity, just candles and lamps; water was fetched from the well; there was an outside loo; and they both bicycled to the village for provisions through the winter floods. When film director Bill Douglas scouted locations for his 1986 drama Comrades – relating the early nineteenth-century Dorset trade unionist saga of the Tolpuddle Martyrs – he wanted a traditional cottage that a team of set designers could return to its unaltered state. Chancing upon the Waller cottage, he found that Bim and Amy had removed virtually all trace of at least two centuries – and so their carefully dilapidated domain appeared in his movie just as it was. London-born Bim Waller had cause to take comfort in the time-warping obscurity of rural life. He was illegitimate and his redoubtable mother, Evelyn, refused to give him up for adoption. To mask the shame she had brought upon them, her wealthy family invented a subterfuge: Evelyn had a mythical sister who had married a Dutchman and moved to Holland, where both had died in a car crash. Evelyn had adopted her orphaned nephew, who was to call her Tanta, the Dutch word for aunt. This when the word bastard was the biggest term of abuse in the Edwardian code of social conventions, and to be exposed in such a state could be deemed a fate worse than death. Tanta moved with her son to a house on the Bryanston estate in Dorset, where she was to help reorganise the gardens around a palatial Norman Shaw mansion for Lord and Lady Portman. Bim had the freedom of the park where he could play with the Portman children but preferred to wander with his sketchbook. Aged six, skipping piano lessons in Blandford, he was spotted by the town architect and offered encouragement. When Tanta discovered her son’s defection from music to art, she hired the architect as a drawing master and bought a box of oil paints. Bim was expelled from boarding school when his illegitimacy was discovered, so they returned to London, where he enrolled at St John’s Wood

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Art School before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools. Tanta ran a lodging house whose paying guests included the pianist Clifford Curzon, a student of Harold Craxton, who led them to Acomb Lodge. Bim also visited the St John’s Wood home of fellow student Leslie Hurry, an undertaker’s son, to draw embalmed corpses in the funeral parlour. Friendly with American art student Andrew Wyeth, Bim followed him for months of painting and farm labouring in Pennsylvania. Then he moved to New York to work for a publisher and paint portraits on the eve of the Wall Street Crash. His job folded, he slept rough and ate in a soup kitchen before being taken on by a merchant ship to work his passage home. Shabby and emaciated, Bim found a refuge with the Hurrys and a friend in Amy Faulkner. Although making only a meagre living as an artist, Amy pooled commissions and connections with a needy artist nine years her junior. They worked jointly and singly on illustrations and stage designs; when they were hired, in 1933, to restore sets at the Alhambra Theatre for Les Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo, they were engaged to be married. Tanta rented a cottage at Compton Abbas in Dorset – where John went for respite care during his unhappy term at Clayesmore School. Bim longed for his childhood scenery, so he and Amy moved to Minchington after marrying, and John soon joined them. Bim was to manage the Eastbury Estate for Ronald Farquharson. He bicycled to work along six miles of lanes and woodland tracks, a journey revealing locations for plein-air painting on days off. The biggest estate of the district, Rushmore, near Tollard Royal, belonged to the Pitt Rivers family, the last lords of Cranborne Chase. They ensured that, in the middle of nowhere, John Craxton had fallen on his feet. For the Pitt Rivers Museum, in a Tudorised Victorian building originally a gypsy school, was an easy walk from the Waller cottage. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers had formed and exhibited two vast and idiosyncratic collections: the first can still be seen in its own museum in Oxford; the other rose like a mirage in the Dorset countryside until a 1960s scattering. As he recovered from the matron’s knife, John walked again and again the mile to Farnham and a world of wonders – shortly after the dismissal of a larger-than-life curator named Trelawney Dayrell Reed. In a cabinet of curiosities he had been the most curious exhibit of all. John would meet him later. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s concept of biological evolution, General Pitt Rivers had amassed artefacts from prehistory to recent times so as to demonstrate evolving material culture. The result was an Aladdin’s cave of archaeological, ethnographical, social and art-historical finds from Cranborne Chase and points all over the planet, presented in what looked to be eclectic and eccentric profusion. Here John, blind to the founder’s theories, educated himself. Sunlight streamed on to treasures in display cabinets with dunes of dust. The lesson was that precious things should be part of everyday life and not shrouded in reverence.

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Mummy portrait of a young man from Hawara, Egypt, c.100 AD Wax encaustic on wood panel, 40.3 × 17.6 cm. Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (formerly in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Dorset)

Cycladic female figure, c.2700–2400 BC Marble, 21.9 × 6.5 × 4.5 cm. Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (formerly in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Dorset)

Amid glories of creativity from so many cultures, John felt most affinity with Ancient Greek art: elegantly elongated female figures carved in marble in the Cycladic islands four or five millennia ago; pottery with spiralling patterns from the Minoan civilisation of Crete around 2000 BC; pots painted with everyday scenes during the Classical period heyday of Athens in the fifth century BC; Fayum panel portraits from Roman-era Egypt, when the prevailing artistic culture of the eastern Mediterranean remained redolently Greek. The last of these – intimate, full-faced likenesses showing people in the prime of life and masking the faces of the dead during mummification – had a profound effect on John Craxton’s art. All would combine to direct the future course of his existence. From now on he dreamed of the Mediterranean and yearned most especially for Greece. Rustic Dorset, as a magical dominion and a first step to life in the sun, seemed gifted by the gods. Here his aunt and uncle gave him the freedom to explore a secret world of art, nature, history and legend where archaeological remains and folk memory extended to depths of Greek richness – uniting

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past and present, fact and fiction and firing a creative imagination. John bicycled with Bim to draw and paint all over Cranborne Chase. Although bisected by Roman and pre-Roman roads, its only surviving settlements are small villages and hamlets hidden in an apparent wilderness. In the 1930s the church bell at Berwick St John was still rung at 8pm from September to March, as a sound beacon for lost travellers bequeathed by a rector who died in 1746. Even today Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Blandford, Wimborne, Ringwood and Fordingbridge edge the Chase like border garrisons. For 500 years from the Norman Conquest, the territory had been guarded as a royal hunting forest for deer, with similar rights then controlled and contested by a clutch of powerful local clans for three more centuries. Between the wars traditional ways of living from the landscape were still active on Cranborne Chase: foresters and gamekeepers in the woods, shepherds and farmers on downs and combes, watercress-growers in chalk streams and potters on clay seams. Ancient wooded tracts were managed in the old manner, with annual auctions of hazel coppices among makers of woven sheep-hurdle fencing, and moss gathered for packaging. Woods were designed for deer; stands of elms, furnishing country chair seats and coffins, were festooned with rookeries. John was especially fond of a tract known as ‘the dark wood’, with spreading oaks, ashes and yews spanning the centuries. The trees bore silent witness to battles waged between keepers and poachers or soldiers and smugglers into the nineteenth century. He roamed in the Larmer Tree pleasure grounds laid out by General Pitt Rivers around the hollow ruin of a wych elm with an oak now at its centre. Here King John’s thirteenth-century huntsmen were reputed to have met. The grounds held a classical temple, open-air theatre, bandstand and buildings from the Indian Exhibition at Earls Court in 1890. Now the exotic concoction was falling romantically apart. Beyond the park the cottagers whose stories the young John Craxton relished were at one with their slumping dwellings and the burial mounds and defensive ditches imprinted on the landscape. Like characters from Thomas Hardy novels, some could quote verses by nineteenth-century poet-priest William Barnes in Dorset dialect. When John first saw Cranborne Chase, in 1934, Paul Nash was researching his Shell Guide to Dorset, in which he would liken the county to a masked face ‘composed of massive and unusual features; at once harsh and tender, alarming yet kind, seeming susceptible to moods but, in secret, overcast by a noble melancholy – or, simply, the burden of its extraordinary inheritance’. Looking back on his youthful wanderings, John wrote: The Dorset landscape is not an obvious physiognomy but, like a person, has many hidden aspects – the mysterious enigmatic earthworks, tumuli and barrows, the atmosphere of conspiracy from the great days of smuggling still lingers, the deep, impenetrable forests with King John’s hunting lodge to prove that time is ever relative.1

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BEAUTIFUL VISITS

Since he was barely 15, John’s education remained a problem. A solution arrived when Harold accepted Jane Howard, granddaughter of the composer Arthur Somervell, as a piano pupil. Five months younger than John, she had fallen ill as a result of bullying at a boarding school. Her mother’s governess was summoned from any idea of retirement and it was agreed that she should also take on other school-allergic pupils. Jane Howard’s ultra-romantic nature was fixed forever when she played Juliet at 14 – the year she wrote her first play, shared a governess with John Craxton and fell for her piano teacher. The pursuit of love was the leitmotif of her life and its recurring disappointment; if she ever found the passion, devotion and drama she craved, bliss never lasted. It remained the central, complex and conflicted theme in her graceful novels, written under the pen name of Elizabeth Jane Howard. Jane’s mother danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and never loved her; her father was a would-be abuser when she found a safe object for a chaste obsession in her piano tutor. Harold dedicated a piece to her and took care to wear for their meetings the sweater she had knitted him – a typically courtly response to an adolescent crush. She met the artistnaturalist Peter Scott at 16, married him at 19 and wrote most of her first novel, The Beautiful Visit, before her 21st birthday. The story’s 16-year-old heroine has a composer/piano teacher father and an ‘incurably romantic’ mother facing the disapproval of her upper-class family for marrying a lowly musician. Here in essence is the story of Harold and Essie Craxton. Miss Cobham, the governess, was old, obese and myopic. Miss Milliment in Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles, she ignored appearances, her own included, to share a joy in learning. She powered above her bulk and age, trotting to and fro in her Ladbroke Grove classes. Everything else was relaxed. A loose daily timetable began at 10.30am and concluded three hours later, with a Friday luncheon party. Endlessly patient and tender, Eleanor Meredith Cobham had high intelligence and wide knowledge, never pressing subjects her charges found irksome – so John, gladly rid of algebra and grammar, missed a grounding in Latin and Greek. The tutor drew her pupils into discussion on any topic they fancied, imparting fascinating facts and ideas in Egyptian history, Italian Renaissance art, the French language, plays, poetry and novels. Jane shared her interests in drama and literature with

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Carol Beddington, whose father, Jack, was publicity director for Shell. Thanks to him, the sides of petrol lorries bore bold modernist posters by the likes of Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and John Piper; many of the artists he commissioned also became his friends. For once, John failed to pursue a useful connection. Absorbed in his own art, he still enjoyed spying for exhilarating images on tankers travelling the roads between London and Selsey. John and Jane visited museums, galleries and theatres together; but concerts ended after a mortifying incident in the Queen’s Hall. A performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony had barely begun when Jane turned to John and loudly demanded: ‘Hold me very tightly. I am going to cry.’ At Acomb Lodge she had privileged access to the jackdaw’s nest that was John’s small bedroom. It glowed with antique rugs and objects bought with pocket money supplied by Daisy Holland when his parents were out of funds. Gifts included Greek and Ottoman artefacts – Grand Tour souvenirs from Smyrna and Constantinople, collected by his Faulkner grandmother. An antique marble Buddha sat on a scrap of orange velvet left over when Essie made a party dress for Janet. The carving had been a present from family friends in Richmond on condition John carried it home. He took Jane on treasure hunts to Caledonian Road market where, for tiny sums, they scooped up Tudor manuscripts, Turkish slippers, Chinese embroidery, illustrated books and Old Master prints and drawings. Their interests merged when Acomb Lodge staged its January review, with sets, costumes, make-up and full houses of paying audiences to aid the Musicians Benevolent Fund. Folding doors between the morning and drawing rooms were opened to form a stage and auditorium. The Craxtons played to their talents: Tim sorted the seating – borrowing benches from Lord’s and ensuring that 90 spectators could be squeezed in for each show; Antony was producer and announcer; Robin wired spotlights, dimmers and batons of footlights; John designed and painted scenery (Ali Baba, the Pied Piper of Hamelin); Michael and Janet sang and acted; Harold donned Edwardian costume to perform ballads such as ‘Silver Threads Among The Gold’; Essie greeted and waved off everyone at the door. Despite displays of serious musicianship – with recitals by promising pianists and an operatic aria – the atmosphere was vaudevillian. Tim’s friend Teddy Barford excelled at comic sketches and the Craxton boys devised shadow plays behind sheets, with one plot enacting an operation in which a string of sausages was extracted from a patient’s stomach. Harold handled encores with burlesque aplomb. By now he had appeared on major platforms with the most distinguished musicians – violinists Jacques Thibaud and Joseph Szigeti, cellist Pablo Casals – and edited Beethoven’s piano sonatas with Donald Tovey. In Acomb Lodge reviews he played the children’s tune ‘Three Blind Mice’ in the style of any composer suggested by his audience and performed the ‘Sleigh Bells Gallop’ with bells strapped to his wrists. In January 1937 Aunt Sylvia, always the first to panic, told Amy that ‘No. 8 was looking more like a circus than ever’ and adding:

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The Pied Piper of Hamelin stage backdrop, c.1937 Oil on canvas, 216 × 285 cm. Craxton Family Archive

The family are now having meals in the studio as there is no other spot. The play is supposed to take place on Monday but none of the family know their parts – or what they are going to do … Some of John’s scenery which I saw seemed quite lovely. After the performance she added: ‘The show last night went better than I expected … John’s done some very effective new scenery … he did some very rhythmic & effective movements as an Indian priest.’ Jane Howard recalled this production with delight: One Christmas the Craxton family put on a production of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. John did all the scenery, which was enchanting and remained in the dining room for weeks; the household revolved around the play. John and I spent those weeks dressed in turbans, long silk robes, pointed slippers and elaborate beards that involved a good deal of spirit gum.1 Then there were recitals, receptions and gatherings of the Harold Craxton Club – drawing colleagues, friends and neighbours including composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, conductor and cellist John Barbirolli, evolutionary biologist

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Julian Huxley and his wife Juliette, painters Laura and Harold Knight, and actresses Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft and Jean Forbes-Robertson (the 1930s Peter Pan). On Grove End Road the party spirit ran through the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler. For most of the Craxton boys and their friends the growing military threat signalled an even bigger adventure. During the Munich Crisis Tim helped Teddy Barford to make a pretend armoured car out of plywood in the garden shed; Teddy then painted it grey and drove to Denham Studios to sell it as a film prop. The vehicle was rejected, so he drove it back again. At 16 John was engrossed in his private world of painting. Most middleclass mothers, hoping for safe career ladders from which their teenage sons were not to deviate until comfortable retirement, would have been at their wits’ end. Essie got to work ever harder on her network. She knew the Manchester Guardian art critic Eric Newton, champion of modernist artists such as Henry Moore, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. Just as she had once arranged for John to show his archaeological finds to Mortimer Wheeler, now she set up an inspection of his drawings by Mr Newton. The critic saw potential in the work and had sympathy with the artist’s aim to study life drawing while going it alone as a painter. As John later put it, ‘I didn’t want to acquire a ready-made Burton suit of paint’. He was directed to Iain Macnab, founding principal of the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Pimlico. Even this forward-looking tutor had to enforce an art-school rule that no student could look at a nude model before the age of 17. The 16-year-old was advised to wait – but actually sent packing. In 1938 Eric Newton wrote the catalogue for a memorial Redfern Gallery exhibition for Christopher Wood, whose work, eight years after his death, was also being shown in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Kit Wood had been the only English artist of his generation to infiltrate the core of European art and society. He had drawn with Picasso, designed for Diaghilev and painted and partied in the French capital and on the Riviera. Pursued by demons, with an opium habit and a revolver in his pocket, he leapt under the Atlantic Coast Express as it roared through Salisbury station one summer day in 1930 when he was 29. This was John’s stop on the journey to Amy and Bim and the association never left him. Kit Wood became a hugely romantic figure for the young Craxton, and the memorial catalogue his ongoing guide. An initial pointer was to Paris. Students walking to St John’s Wood Art School passed Acomb Lodge. John had already spotted the ‘long El Greco face’ of John Minton, whose air of tragic dynamism struck a warning note. Now he met the rampageous April Pollard, who told him of a pending migration from ‘The Wood’ to Paris, and an art school with life classes open to all. Her father had flown General Franco from the Canary Isles to Morocco in 1936, to muster troops for the Spanish Civil War. April in Paris threatened more trouble abroad. Student friends John Minton and Michael Ayrton had been drawn to Paris by a backlash to Cubist-based abstraction now emerging in the poetic forms of

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Surrealism and Neo-Romanticism. The key Neo-Romantics were the Russian émigrés Eugene Berman and Pavel Tchelitchew and Parisian Christian Bérard – a theatricality in their lyrical work making them all accomplished stage designers. Berman in particular added a sense of melancholia in images of lonely figures in blasted landscapes owing something to the eerie, symbolladen Greek ruins of Giorgio de Chirico – the Volos-raised and Athens-trained painter of Italian origin who had influenced and then infuriated the Surrealists in Paris. Such visions of devastation suited the tension of the times and captivated the two now former art students who wanted to meet their heroes and work in the creative heart of things. John and April, however, were out for their own adventures. In the spring of 1939, Essie wrote to Nina Milkina’s parents in Paris to secure open-ended accommodation for her wanderer son. Sick on the ferry and exhausted when met at the Gare St-Lazare, John was delivered to lodgings with Admiral and Madame Court and their three children at 11 Villa du Parc de Montsouris – a mansion in a private cul-de-sac beside a landscaped park laid out in 1869, just ahead of the Franco-Prussian War. Here, in the southern 14th arrondissement, with all of central Paris within walking distance, there was calm before another storm. Charles and Germaine Court let a garden studio to the Milkins. Sophie, Nina’s mother, was an ‘elegant, super-grand White Russian lady’; her father, who had now changed his name from Jacob to Jacques in French fashion, had studied under Ilya Repin, the pre-eminent Russian artist of the nineteenth century, and had left behind a substantial reputation of his own when they fled the onset of Stalinist terror for Paris. Reduced circumstances had done nothing to diminish their sense of style, with a sheet draped across their single room like a grand curtain to separate living and working spaces. ‘They had such nobility’, John said. On the mantelpiece there were ‘good Russian things’ and Jacques’s work was everywhere. Entertaining, and encouraging about John’s drawings, he advised cutting a hole in cardboard as an aid to focusing on a subject. It was in Paris that John found he had an instinct for perspective. Jacques said presciently: ‘One day you will design beautiful ballet décor.’ Madame Court paid John to eat cakes in the park to spare her children bad habits. Family and guests sat down to magnificent formal meals including foie gras and a speciality Armagnac from Madame Court’s family estate in the Gers. ‘One day an aviator came to lunch – a World War One hero who had been in a crash and flames had eaten away one side of his face’, John said. ‘He was frightening, but I managed to sit there without looking appalled. We had leg of lamb with garlic cloves sticking in it, and whenever I saw a leg of lamb after that I thought of his ravaged face.’ The prevailing mood was more lighthearted and, 80 years later, one of the Court sons, Michel, could still remember meal-time laughter during John’s stay – as when the conversation turned to love and the lodger placed a handkerchief over his mouth to make comic kissing impressions with his lips. After settling in, and sampling the

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attractions, John sent Harold and Essie a letter with an ink drawing of Notre Dame cathedral: It is a very nice family and I am getting on very well with them, they have the most marvellous yoghurt, cream of chestnuts, fromage blanc, vin ordinaire, delicious French salads and some dishes which even Mrs Cooper [a sometime cook at Acomb Lodge] has never dreamt of?! Please for goodness sake send some money to me. I have only 9 francs left after seeing all the sights – Notre Dame, museums and tasting the best out of practically every boulangerie in Paris. Even the faithful Essie, performing daily housekeeping feats close to the biblical miracle of loaves and fishes, might have gulped at news of a son spent out on the pastries of Paris. He never let on that he was being bribed by his hostess to gorge in the park – and for all his sweet excesses he would return home thinner than ever. Introductions beyond the Milkins and the Courts had come to naught; April Pollard had been virtually stretchered home after falling ill on the field of bohemian action. Paris was his to discover in his own way: I travelled everywhere on my own; never got picked up by anybody. I bought a seventeenth-century wooden angel for the equivalent of a few shillings and fell in love with the place. It was all absolute bliss for me. Georges Braque lived near the Courts and John never knew it. He walked past buildings unaware of their significance in his later life – one in the Rue du Bac, where a rich young aesthete called Peter Watson was assembling a fabulous collection of modern art. He wandered oblivious past Picasso’s studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins, where Guernica had been painted. On the Right Bank he explored the Louvre and roamed to Montmartre, where avant-garde painters had first gathered. Usually he took the shorter walk to Montparnasse, where the most interesting writers and artists mingled in the Dome, Flore and Select cafés, and he never stepped inside. His goal lay in the heart of this creative district in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière. Here Paul Gauguin had worked, Amedeo Modigliani had died and Minton and Ayrton now had a studio. John’s goal was the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Founded in 1904, the art school without barriers had already featured teachers such as Antoine Bourdelle, Fernand Léger and Ossip Zadkine, and pupils from all over the world including Modigliani, Alexander Calder, Balthus and Alberto Giacometti. Many went unrecorded since, separate from the tutored classes, the main appeal was a life-drawing programme where anyone could turn up and pay small fees at the door – for a three-hour pose in the morning, two 30-minute stints in the afternoon, and ten-minute sessions throughout the evening. In a gaunt high room with a north light, and with chairs and easels gathered around a stove,

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there was silent concentration on the model of the moment. John may have coincided here with two young Scotsmen called Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, who had begun and were now ending a touring scholarship to the Continent in Paris, with cheap lodgings close to the school. No words were exchanged. After ‘pink-faced embarrassment’ at his first sight of a naked female model, John was absorbed in the task of depiction: ‘I had lovely hand-made paper and I tried to draw with a pen in the single-line Augustus John style. It wasn’t much good. But I was off the top diving board, realising how difficult it was.’ To be sure of getting the most that progressive Parisian art tuition could provide, he also dropped in on life-drawing classes at the Académie Julian in the arcaded Passage des Panoramas. The Louvre lay handily en route. He never met the artists with whom he would later be linked in the British Neo-Romantic movement, nor mentioned seeing the work of their steering spirits in Paris. As he began to hone skills in portraiture, he was drawn to Old Master paintings in the Louvre, and especially to two artists of the French Renaissance: François Clouet and Corneille de Lyon. The latter introduced the half-length portrait to France and favoured a direct gaze for minutely realised yet enigmatic figures. Since no works were signed, and only one fully documented, John could delight in the art of detection – as well as his penchant for part of a story remaining a mystery. Crossing the river via the Île de la Cité, he wandered along the quays and into Notre Dame and Saint-Chapelle – the thirteenth-century royal chapel and religious reliquary of majestic Gothic grandeur. One balmy June day, two months into his stay, he was shocked to find the great stained-glass windows being removed. War was plainly imminent and now he could no longer ignore the clamour from his parents to come home. In London he saw trenches being dug in Hyde Park. Six and a half years were to pass before John could resume his desired life on the Continent. For a few weeks he blotted out the warnings of war, thanks to family connections and precocious skills. The Craxtons were friendly with Russian émigré Lydia Kyasht. Described by one besotted critic as ‘the world’s most beautiful dancer’, she had turned to teaching and formed a youthful company called Ballet de la Jeunesse Anglaise. Madame Kyasht must have seen John’s décor for Acomb Lodge reviews because she now asked him to design sets and costumes for a ballet due in the West End’s Cambridge Theatre in early September. He wrote to his aunts: ‘It is the first big job I have ever done & you can be sure I am thrilled about it.’ The astonishing break for a 16-year-old would be one of the first casualties of war. He consoled himself with a first publication – designing the ‘Great Thoughts’ calendar for 1940 compiled by Aunt Sylvia and printed by C.W. Faulkner & Co. He also delivered to the family firm an engraved woodblock for a Christmas card, then reported to Bim and Amy that ‘as they somehow destroyed half the design by burning it away the whole thing looked a mess’. Rather more burning and mess lay in store.

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A PRIVATE WAR

On Monday 2 September 1939, the day after Germany invaded Poland, John sent an urgent appeal to Amy and Bim. He was stuck in Scotland, sketching in a ruined cathedral church and feeling as forlorn as his surroundings. Harold and Essie had left their son with an architect friend. ‘I’m stranded in St Andrews with no money & with all my lovely antiques in London’, he wrote. ‘If I arrived in Dorset would [you] be able to put [me] up?’ Where syntax failed, he hoped a drawing of himself with suitcases might win sympathy. A PS was unlikely to spur the Wallers into action: ‘I shall probably be in London when this letter gets to you. How are you? Im simply flouryshing. Tell George I would love to take the cottage during the war even if mummy said no.’ More of George later. Minutes after the declaration of war, on 3 September, air-raid warnings sounded in London – the first of many false alarms during an eight-month ‘Phony War’. Civilians were issued with gas masks in stringed boxes, to carry on their shoulders at all times. John’s was mostly forgotten while his art materials were always remembered. In the first year of conflict he was beset by family battles. After managing to reclaim his mother’s attention and return to Acomb Lodge, he found the household even more mobilised than usual. Pupils had been lost, lodgers were enlisting and the Craxton finances were near to bombing. Essie hoped to take the younger children to Selsey, but the bungalow lease was nearly up and could not be renewed. At 16 Tim Craxton had run away to Croydon Aerodrome, begging to train as a pilot. Fobbed off by an apprenticeship with the de Havilland aircraft manufacturers, he joined the Royal Air Force at 19. Now he was having the time of his life – a Spitfire and Gauntlet fighter pilot at last. Tim left two dogs in Grove End Road: Hawker and Fury. Amid all the tensions of the Phony War, two of John’s brothers grew more and more hostile to his irresponsible way of being. As John admitted: The whole of my early life was just spongeing off my parents. Through thick and thin I was allowed to live at home, or subsidised to stay with friends and relatives, in order to paint. Only Antony and Robin thought that I should get a job and stand on my own feet. My mother did all she could to advance my career, but it was my father who really loved

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having a visual artist in the family. We were part of an impoverished bohemia and being a painter came easily out of that. I could have gone to the bad very easily. Having that antagonism from my brothers was a positive help because this gave me a reason to work. It shouldn’t just be handed on a plate. Perhaps his older brothers had also fathomed the state of John’s personal affairs. Having turned 17 that October, he was picking up antiques and also starting to be picked up by antiques dealers in Lisson Grove and Kensington Church Street. A taste for erotic adventure was sharpened by the air of possibility in the blackout. His seducers – if such they were, given the readiness of the younger party in each liaison – were risking long jail terms. The age of heterosexual consent in Britain in 1939 was 16; homosexual sex was illegal, even in private, for anyone and this part of the legal code was enforced with vindictive vigour. John Craxton was far from alone in finding the illicit an added attraction. Given the threat of sudden death in an air raid, many became sexually active as never before and took their exciting and consoling pleasures where and while they could. Determined to paint above everything else, John knew that he needed help with the drawing that would underpin his art. Although his early resistance to art schools had produced a virtual veto on the St John’s Wood Art School a street away from Acomb Lodge, he had come to admire the co-principal Pat Millard – tutor and mentor of John Piper and John Minton, friend of Harold and Essie. Early in 1940 he decided to join the patrician teacher in his new billet at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, now amalgamated with Westminster School of Art. What was known as the Central Schools occupied imposing purpose-built premises in Bloomsbury’s Southampton Row – the building seeming ever more of a beacon for the arts, and for civilisation itself, as the nearby British Museum was shut, dark and empty. It proved a scary refuge since, save for twice-weekly trips with kind Mr Millard to draw animals in London Zoo before their evacuation to Whipsnade, John was taught by the acerbic Bernard Meninsky and near-mute William Roberts: All the boys and girls around me were in thrall to Meninsky and Roberts. They were marvellously good. I was so envious of the drawings and

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paintings they produced to mimic the work of our tutors. Later on they just sank without trace. Looking at one of John’s feeble but imaginative efforts, Meninsky said: ‘You can’t draw at all, but I will help you because I admire your father.’ On the student’s mauled sheet of paper he sketched with swift fluency a female figure, which John kept for the rest of his life. This was a lesson in itself, as was being open and vulnerable – pared down to the bare, nerve-exposed essentials where true creativity began. His happiest times during months at the Central Schools were in the sculpture classes he took to increase his understanding of form and volume. They were led by Eric Schilsky, the son of a Polish-French violinist and a friend of Aunt Amy. Schilsky’s sympathetic temperament gave a nervous student confidence. One day he pondered John’s carving of a cellist, then said: ‘You are an artist.’ That was enough. Now John had one of the luckiest breaks of his life. James Iliff, a music student staying with the Craxtons, was a discovery of Peter Watson – the wealthy aesthete who had fled Paris and launched the Horizon review of literature and art late in 1939 with writers Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. In April 1940 Peter telephoned James to invite him to the London premiere of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. The piano pupil had a late lesson, so handed the phone to John, who gladly took the ticket. In the foyer of the Queen’s Hall, he felt he was meeting an old friend. After the concert, deep in conversation, John and Peter walked to the Kardomah tearooms on Piccadilly, where string quartets entertained the customers. Peter had an appointment with another protégé, who turned out to be the poet David Gascoyne – ‘a wonderfully handsome, romantic figure with a faraway look, who was recently the toast of the Surrealists in Paris’. Peter left the painter and poet to talk while he bought John a yellow tie. David Gascoyne had introduced Surrealist poetry to Britain. He had mixed with avant-garde writers and artists in Paris, witnessed the Spanish Civil War and helped organise the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 – where Salvador Dali would have suffocated while lecturing in a deep-sea diver’s suit had Gascoyne not been swift to find a spanner and unlock the helmet. Despite such quick wits, he held to the Surrealist ethos of the supremacy of dreams and the unconscious, and when John met him was close to completing his finest metaphysical poems. That faraway look hinted at a deepening dependency on amphetamines. For all the romance of the doomed poet, John was captivated by the life-enlarging appeal of a new friend and patron – who was introducing an artist named Lucian Freud in the latest issue of Horizon. Peter (born Victor William) Watson had inherited a fortune from a thousand margarine-retailing branches of the Maypole Dairy Company, which he was pouring into a collector’s passion for beautiful things and brilliant young men. He had what Connolly called ‘a genius for gracious living’, and his tall, slim, svelte-suited

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Peter Watson, 1944 Conté pencil on paper, 31.5 × 21 cm. Private collection

elegance was heightened by the glamour of the exceedingly generous. Peter had impeccable taste; his favourite word was ‘delicious’. He gave out pleasure – sharing a ‘wonderful feeling for food, painting, architecture, music, literature, poetry and style’ – while saving an underlying melancholy for himself. Funding Horizon, and serving as its art editor, he was to prove the perfect connector for John Craxton. But not just yet. John now decided to decamp to Dorset, for life-drawing classes at Salisbury School of Art and Crafts. Amy and Bim had bought the next-door cottage, where Sylvia was already installed and John was to follow. He had no intention of remaining in the care of his watchful aunts and uncle. One of his first flings was with an artistic gay man called George Parker, who lived near the Wallers and was sufficiently camouflaged to be presentable to them.

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Trelawney Dayrell Reed by Augustus John, c.1918 Oil on canvas, 61.2 × 41 cm. Private collection

In the late summer of 1939 there was the suggestion that John might rent the Parker cottage for the duration of the war. The more attractive option was for George to stay put, in part as a decoy. Soon after bicycling over the hill for ‘tea with George’, John was taking off with his disreputable friend Trelawney Dayrell Reed to tour archaeological sites across Dorset and Wiltshire. This wraith-thin, darkly bearded and sometimes becloaked giant looked like a pantomime villain – and relished the risks of playing such a role to the full (right down to inflammatory red socks). How much of it was a comic act and how much the real thing was never quite clear. John adored him on sight (and sported brightly coloured socks ever after). Amateur archaeologist, poet, painter and authority on the pub game of Shove-Halfpenny, Trelawney had called on Augustus John in Dorset’s Alderney Manor one teatime before the First World War, then stayed on for several years in a manner surprising to all save the Johns and the Craxtons. He modelled his character on the rumbustious artist host and also sat for a roguish portrait. When finally persuaded to move out, he bought nearby Woodtown Farm – where he painted some artistically and sexually vigorous murals, and where he and a low-flying airman nearly came a cropper. In April 1927 it was reported that ‘a gentleman farmer and artist aged about 38’ stood accused of the attempted murder of Squadron Leader W.H. Longton. Trelawney had fired two cartridges into the air when an aeroplane called Bluebird shattered his rural peace. In May he was cleared of reduced charges of common assault on the pilot and malicious damage to the aircraft: farm workers swore that he had not aimed at the aeroplane; the fact that Bluebird was peppered with shot-holes matching the Reed ammo was discounted. The gentleman farmer also convinced a jury of his kind that a policeman had misheard him confessing to being ‘half mad’ at the Easter incursion. His cows had been left semi-demented and his mother and hollyhocks were upset too. The blameless gentleman’s view was not recorded when, a month after the acquittal, Squadron Leader Longton and another ace racer were killed in an aerial collision within earshot of Woodtown Farm.

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Trelawney was a wonderful friend and his own worst enemy. He could leave a pub full of soldiers rolling with laughter. In a bar-side discussion about class he had won John’s lasting admiration by avowing: ‘There are only two classes: the people you like and the people you don’t like.’ He was also prone to declare with incendiary wit: ‘Huntin’ does give one the opportunity of dressin’ like a gentleman, but I’ve always thought the real test was how to undress like a gentleman.’ When asked whether he had pigs on his farm, he notoriously replied: ‘No. The boys have the pigs. I have the boys.’1 Such flippant bombshells were bound to land the Wildean figure in tribulation, and he had been sacked as the Pitt Rivers Museum curator amid rumours that he did indeed have the boys. Allegations went no further than the local police station – continuing the defendant’s lucky streak with the law. But word was out and Amy said: ‘There’s no smoke without fire.’ Retreating to his farm, but not altering his behaviour one iota, Trelawney opened a plant nursery. His lorry was exempt from petrol restrictions and so, with his gardener serving as chauffeur, he gave John joyrides into ancient history and a new social circle. They motored to see fascinating figures such as Alexander Keiller – the Dundee marmalade millionaire who lived at Avebury Manor, close to the stone circle whose study he financed – and Tancred Borenius, archaeologist, connoisseur and Apollo magazine founder. Also O.G.S. (Osbert Guy Stanhope) Crawford, a cranky old Marxist and archaeologist of the Ordnance Survey mapping ancient treasures of Wessex and beyond. O.G.S. was working on a critique of contemporary material society entitled ‘Bloody Old Britain’, an

Pots from Crichel Down, Dorset, 1940–1 Oil on board, 24.5 × 34.5 cm. Private collection

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excoriating account never to be published. In 1938, as head of the Prehistoric Society, he invited the Nazi-persecuted Gerhard Bersu to England to excavate an Iron Age roundhouse at Little Woodbury, on the Cranborne side of Salisbury. John and Trelawney visited often, although the dig had been abandoned when war began since the Jewish Bersu was interned on the Isle of Man as an ‘enemy alien’. In 1934 Mortimer Wheeler had started digging at Maiden Castle, near Dorchester – the biggest Iron Age hill fort in Britain. A stream of visitors over successive summers included T.E. Lawrence just before his death, Augustus John and archaeologists ranging from the esteemed Sir Arthur Evans, uncoverer of Minoan Crete, to Trelawney Reed and John Craxton. All were drawn by vivid newspaper reports of a battle of Britain from antiquity. The headline Wheeler discovery was a cemetery claimed to reveal the slaughter of Celtic defenders by Vespasian’s forces after the AD 43 Roman invasion. It made for a powerful monograph in 1943, when Britain struggled again. In 1944 Trelawney was similarly to seize on the excitement of D-Day with his stirring book The Battle for Britain in the Fifth Century: An Essay in Dark Age History. That was also the year when his luck with the law ran out: he was fined half a crown for failing to carry an identity card – an ironic verdict since he proclaimed his inimitable identity wherever he went. Through Trelawney, John became friendly with Stuart Piggott, who lived with his wife, Peggy, on Cranborne Chase at Rockbourne. Both had been involved in important archaeological digs in the Avebury area. Through Stuart he then met the British Museum curator (and future director) T.D. Kendrick, whose wit and breadth of interests – from Anglo-Saxon art to Victorian stained glass – made for an excellent guide and companion. Injured in the First World War, Tom Kendrick limped on long hikes to country churches, where John sketched and incorporated charcoal rubbings of medieval brass memorials into evocative, time-bending compositions. Already he found an affinity with Max Ernst and his experiments in frottage. In wartime Blandford oranges and bananas vanished from market stalls, then the market closed altogether. As a Dig for Victory movement engulfed even the wild reaches of Cranborne Chase, vast swathes of grassland on the downs were ploughed for barley, oats and wheat. On the Eastbury estate an assault began to clear 700 acres of ‘derelict’ woodland, with an arsenal of heavy machinery ultimately to include demobilised Sherman tanks. Local landscapes around the Chase and Salisbury Plain were strewn with air bases, army camps and training grounds, and the sinister Chemical Defence Experimental Station at Porton Down was close enough for discomfort. For John the most traumatic change was in people. He saw the innocence of Minchington villagers perverted by war into mean suspicion and fear. Since spies could be anywhere, as an official campaign reported, everyone was being spied on by their neighbours – and John by his relatives most of all. Amy and Bim then did a strange thing. Fearing that John was being

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corrupted by Trelawney, they tried to tighten their hold via formal adoption. This was such an odd move that their daughter Elizabeth, born in 1941, would later wonder whether it revealed a closer bond than that between aunt and nephew. The indomitable Amy had suffered a ‘nervous collapse’ in the early 1920s, and retired to remotest Wales until returning, as feisty as ever, several months later. Could John have been Amy’s son? It is highly unlikely, and in any case Essie – though happy to give all her children away for long periods – was not prepared to surrender her most indulged boy entirely. The takeover bid was dropped. Family conflict through the spring and summer of 1940 muffled dire news of wider war. When German forces overran the Low Countries from 10 May and defeated France in six weeks, John was personally affected by the fall of Paris. Like other Jews all over Europe, the Milkins had tried to emigrate as the Nazi threat intensified. Sophie was granted refuge in Britain but Jacques was rejected. Forced to choose between life with her daughter and other kin in England, and her husband, Sophie chose her spouse. Ahead of the German advance, the Court family moved south to the Free Zone of Vichy France, to which thousands of Jews were now fleeing. Admiral Court became a powerful area prefect. The indebted Milkins, possibly hoping that they might have French military protection, stayed on as caretakers in Villa du Parc de Montsouris – waiting for history to swallow them. Now joined by his sister Janet, John found the war with Hitler reaching as far as Minchington once the aerial Battle of Britain began in July. He was out sketching when a sniper plane opened fire in the lane, sending Bim into a hedge, Janet into a barn and Sylvia into hysterics in the garden. The local grocer, delivering bread, was thrown from his horse and cart and knocked out cold. When John came home one head was being bandaged and calm restored to all with cups of tea. Bim persuaded John to paint Eastbury House – the surviving service wing of a lost mansion designed by Sir John Vanbrugh in the early eighteenth century. After gaining permission from the resident squire, Ronald Farquharson, and setting up his easel in the drive, John was swooped on by the police. His picture was torn up and he was taken into custody as a suspected enemy agent. Amy secured his release and eventually an apology. Days after the incident a local farmer stopped supplying the Wallers with milk. The Meaden family, in the farmhouse across the lane, agreed to sell a daily pint – squirted from the cow into Amy’s tin can. For unconforming incomers, rural areas in wartime gave uncertain refuge. A few weeks after John’s arrest a policeman arrived on a bicycle and remained all day outside the Minchington cottage. He reappeared for several successive mornings, but even Amy knew better than to ask the nature of his surveillance mission and arouse more suspicion. When the Wallers learned later that they had been reported as spies they were all

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the more indignant because in 1937 they had snubbed George Pitt Rivers (grandson of the general) when he tried to recruit them into the pro-Fascist Wessex Agricultural Defence Association. As an air of paranoia prevailed, a couple of harmless eccentric neighbours went completely off their heads on hearing that they, too, were suspected traitors. Mrs Wilks turned up one day asking Amy to ‘return my other eye as the German Colonel is coming to tea’. Mr Wilks patrolled the lane in his nightshirt, ringing a dinner bell and warning that the Chinese Red Army was in the vicinity. Deep in the countryside, demons were being unleashed. Trelawney was now bombarding John with infatuated notes. ‘No normal man writes so many letters a week’, fumed Bim. The enclosures included drawings of John as a long-haired Adonis and Trelawney as a naked Pan drinking from a goat’s horn amid his garden foxgloves. The sender was beside himself when no word came in prompt reply. In one posted envelope he sent a stamped and addressed card to himself and wrote on the reverse: I am alive dead * Kindly strike out whichever of these words is inapplicable to your condition.

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He must have received the longed-for answer before mailing because he himself struck out the word ‘dead’ and added ‘laudate domini’. By 24 July 1940 he was hysterical, writing: O wanton John! I am so angry with you – FURIOUS. In twenty long years I’ve led a beautifully balanced life & then along you come with your clumsy cloven feet & kick the scales over … You are THE MOST REVOLTING BOY THERE EVER WAS. What ages it is since I saw or heard of you. I keep looking in your crystal – and all I can see is a vivid flame darting about in an amorphous milky circle – which is – the flame, I mean – I suppose – YOU – but that tells me nothing I didn’t know already. I must see you soon. I will think of a plan & let you know! Are you an unnecessary luxury?? – (see Interim Budget) – are they going to put a 24% tax on you? – I can hardly bear the thought – what a dilemma choosing between you & a glass of beer. He added a picture of John outweighing a pint of beer on a set of scales and the caption ‘you see which I choose’. On 1 August – the day Hitler’s Directive No. 17 vowed to intensify air and sea warfare against England ‘to establish the necessary conditions for the final conquest’ – Trelawney was euphoric: I’ve got your letter – Hurry! Hurry!! Hurry!!! … Good Trelawneys go to heaven – I can make no promises – I am a Reed shaken by the wind –

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I shall be just as obscene as opportunity demands – neither more nor less – so there! – you can’t think how hungry I am – I chomp & foam at the thought of Saturday’s rations. Amy and Sylvia wailed warnings like a chorus in a Greek tragedy – and fired back accusatory postcards. Then Bim confronted Trelawney when finding him with John in a Blandford street. He followed up the assault by dashing to London to inform Harold and Essie. Trelawney had already replied defensively to a card from Sylvia: I am sorry you disapprove of John’s going about with me. I like him enormously & have a very high opinion of his potential capacity as an artist. My aim has been to encourage him in his work & to introduce him to such people and things in this county as would, I thought (& think) assist in his mental development. Now he went on an all-out offensive against Bim, charging him in a letter copied to Harold and Essie of a ‘cowardly malignant lie’ delivered from a ‘morbid & abnormal state of mental instability’. His counter-attack alleged that Bim’s real motive was jealousy over John’s superiority as an artist. As tensions with his aunts and uncle seethed, John went to London with the allegedly wicked Trelawney plus a Mrs Joey Macdonald to show Essie the breadth of the Reed circle and conceal its actual focus. Joey drove them in her car with Trelawney’s petrol. Essie found John’s flamboyant friend amusing and charming. Since he was also an accomplished painter, she thought him a splendid mentor to her artful son. But then Trelawney could not resist sending his beloved a private poem of killing wit. If exposed, John’s Secret would have exploded the poet’s last secrets too: In Gussage Vale the hills are steep. (Mr Wilks was air warden there.) And the Gussage Brook runs still & deep. (Green beetles nested in Wilks’s hair.) It was there I dwelt with my aunties twain (And Mr Wilks he lived next door.) And I’ll tell you how my aunts were slain. (Mr Wilks was the son of a whore.) After the flicks we thought it best, As the hour was late and petrol short, I should rest till dawn on George’s breast – And my two aunts said I hadn’t ought.

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So I seized my two aunts by their hair (Old Wilks was ringing his dinner bell.) And took ’em and drowned ’em then and there (Old Wilks was tolling his death knell.) I held them down with a forked ash stake (Old Wilks’s feet were echoing near.) Till the bubbles ceased to rise & break (Old Wilks was hollering out ‘All’s Clear’.) I pulled them out & bore them back (Old Wilks was snoring as loud as hell.) Their hair was dripping, their limbs were slack: I dropped them deep in old Wilks’s well. Next day at eve policemen came To Wilks’s house for to enquire. Said: ‘You old bugger, you’re to blame.’ And they took him away in a Black Maria. They stood him in front of the Blandford beaks (O Ronald squints at the tip of his nose.) And the squire said ‘Grill ’im till ’e squeaks.’ (What the squire says in Blandford goes.) So now I cultivate all my vices With never an aunt to interfere And indulge with George when a film entices (Old Wilks was hanged at Dorchester.) So there is peace in the Gussage Vale. No tongue nor bell affronts the quiet, Only a rattle & smell of ale As Trelawney approaches in Joey’s Fiat. One of Trelawney’s letters ended: ‘I long to see you. I’ve got 400000000000 things I want to talk to you about – & a book I want you to read.’ Perhaps that tome was Richard Hull’s best-selling darkly comic novel The Murder of My Aunt. From early in the war it was one of John’s favourites. While his aunts remained unslain, the clan war continued. In the end John was forced to seek peace in London. At Acomb Lodge, on 9 September 1940, ongoing anger towards his Dorset kin was expressed in a letter addressing the ‘malicious scandal engineered entirely by yourselves’:

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It is not uncommon for people who live most of their life cooped up in a cottage and without the chance of social life to think as you do … you are desperately jealous, so jealous in fact that you do your best to prevent me going out. you invent suggest suspect and talk filthy lies and scandal in a vain effort to get my father and mother to sympathise with you and forbid me from enjoying myself… As I am coming down as soon as I can, I realized that it was my duty to let you know my feelings in this matter. Lots of love, John PS The raids here are awfull. I sleep from 10 to 6 in an air raid shelter they have bombed Tussauds into a heap of rubble theres not a pane of glass left in Baker Street

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Cocooned in his family drama, John had got himself home to London for the start of the Blitz on Saturday 7 September. Over 57 consecutive nights, in raids involving an average of 200 aeroplanes, the Luftwaffe dropped 18,291 tons of high explosives and countless incendiaries on the capital. Close to the Royal Academy of Music, Madame Tussauds was one of the first hits – with John Craxton among crowds finding a model of Adolf Hitler disappointingly intact amid the surreal carnage of severed wax limbs and smashed heads. He had yet to learn when he wrote his angry note to Bim and Amy that the 9 September toll through blast and fire included stores, offices and warehouses at 1–79 Golden Lane – the paper-packed premises of C.W. Faulkner & Co., Essie’s family firm, among them. Tim Craxton had been flying Spitfires in France – returning to England on 13 June, with a Distinguished Flying Cross, as German troops entered the Paris suburbs. When hailed as a hero he married photographer Pamela Booth, whose father taught with Harold at the Royal Academy of Music. The Battle of Britain could have done for Tim, had he not been headhunted for the Photographic Development Unit seeking out bombing targets in occupied Europe. He ended as a squadron leader on nocturnal North Atlantic crossings. While ever fearless, he found that his stomach was perfectly settled before each operation by a champagne cocktail. Unlike his marriage, Tim survived the war. Michael Craxton, aged 15, collected shrapnel during the bombing and stored the pieces in a tin – lifting the lid many decades on still unleashes a whiff of cordite and the stench of the Blitz. He also collected live ammunition. The most placid Craxton sibling later entertained his children by throwing bullets into a bonfire. Rather than chopping down an unwanted tree in his London garden, he blew it up. For John Craxton the war was really background noise. By October – and his eighteenth birthday – he was roaming around the Kent hamlet of Reading Street, near Tenterden. In half-timbered Ebony Cottage, he was being palmed off on yet more friends of Harold and Essie: the Shakespearean actors Harcourt Williams and Jean Sterling Mackinlay. They had been part of Ellen Terry’s set and still lived next to her home at Smallhythe Place. John was intrigued by the shrine to the leading lady of Victorian theatre, then preserved by her stage producer daughter Edy (Edith) Craig, who lived in neighbouring Priest’s House

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with dramatist Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall) and artist Tony (Clare) Atwood in a lesbian ménage à trois. The now-elderly trio and their distinguished neighbours were all involved in the Barn Theatre Society and its plays in Dame Ellen’s converted barn. More drama lay in a rural setting, where John wandered with his sketchbook. That March, he had admired Graham Sutherland’s painting Association of Oaks as reproduced in Horizon, where two abstracted and anthropomorphised trees seemed to lean together in whispered conversation. Now he was taken by a Monster Field feature by Paul Nash in the October issue of the Architectural Review, revisiting surrealistic photos the artist had taken in 1938 of two lightningstruck and storm-toppled elms: the jagged ogres prefigured crashed and burned aeroplanes. John tackled his landscape pictures with renewed vigour, depicting a ruined barn and felled trees when convinced that metaphor could convey more than a documentary image. Above all, however, the uprooted tree was an emblem for his sense of self. Torn from his creative life in continental Europe, he now fretted about conscription. The noise of war was coming nearer. Later that October he manoeuvred his way back to Dorset and sprang a sly plan of escape from claustrophobic Minchington. Amy was now pregnant, so the problem of John was no longer the priority. After a stint in the Blandford Food Office, Bim Waller would be mostly absent during the war. Injured as a despatch rider in North Africa, he was invalided back to England where his leg wound festered – until Amy denounced the hospital doctor as a Fifth Columnist. Bim was then posted to the Bletchley Park decryption centre for enemy codes and ciphers. With everyone else preoccupied, John plotted with Trelawney so that

Monster Field by Paul Nash, 1938 Photograph, 8.5 × 12.7 cm. Tate

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he could live with Stuart Piggott at Priory Farm in Rockbourne. Essie approved, since Stuart and his wife Peggy were well-connected, erudite and pleasant – with wealth enough to feed an evacuee for free. Unknown to Essie, the Piggotts lived in a mariage blanc. While possibly not quite a disinterested party, Stuart became a benevolent guardian for John’s desired development. Stuart took John to meet his neighbour, David Cecil, at West Hayes – a historic house spread around a large library. The perfect host, David Cecil (Lord Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil, second son of the 4th Marquess of Salisbury) looked like a Modigliani portrait. A literary historian and fellow of New College, Oxford, he exuded sympathy, curiosity and wit. Asked to describe Virginia Woolf, he replied: ‘A cross between a Madonna and a horse.’ Here John met the writer L(eslie) P(oles) Hartley, who had been in love with David Cecil since a first meeting in Oxford in 1919. Their intimacy ruptured with Cecil’s marriage to Rachel MacCarthy, but the friendship was lifelong. Hartley had a fortune built on his father’s fenland brick business, and he had been living as a socialite novelist in Venice when war forced him home. He rented the medieval Court House in Lower Woodford, Salisbury, with a landing stage to the River Avon; but the gondola lover was dismayed to find boating now forbidden. Deep in the melancholic life of an exile, and his most productive period as an artist, L.P. Hartley was presently working on The Shrimp and The Anemone. It would lead to his masterpiece, The Go-Between, with the deathless opening line ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ In the summer of 1941 he moved to West Hayes as the Cecils wanted the house for only a few weeks each year. Hartley was a close friend of the novelist Leo Myers – whose daughter, E.Q., was currently lodging with the Cecils at Rockbourne together with her three small children. Leo was begging her ‘not to be too frivolous, as it is unsuitable to current events’ when, as David Cecil remarked, it was the one thing they were all trying hard to remain.1 John was instantly drawn to E.Q. when they met at West Hayes. Her mother was an American heiress – her railway-pioneer grandfather founded Colorado Springs – and Leo, her father, a high-living leftist who, John said, had the Daily Worker delivered by a butler on a silver salver. She had married into the Nicholson family of artists: her architect husband, Christopher, known as Kit, was the son of William Nicholson and Mabel Pryde, brother of Nancy and Ben Nicholson and brother-in-law formerly of Winifred Nicholson and currently of Barbara Hepworth. E.Q. trained in textile design and then worked with Kit on interiors. With similar wiry hair, round glasses and electric energy, they looked more like siblings than spouses. Theirs was a marriage of shared taste, where coolest modernism was warmed by a crafted, humanised and individualised touch. In Kit’s constructions it was as if the Bauhaus school of Walter Gropius had been tempered by Edwin Lutyens – builder on tradition and friend of the Nicholson family. Now, with Kit away in the war, E.Q. had brought their children to shelter in a Dorset bolt-hole from the Blitz. Although she was 14 years older than John,

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they met as youthful equals. He adored her restlessly creative energy and drive to mould life as she wished – including a vehement rejection of her birth names, Elsie Queen. He helped her to look for a wartime base, and together they found Alderholt Mill House, beside an old watermill still grinding corn on an island in the River Allen near Fordingbridge. They were both amused that the owner was a Mr Bacchus – imagining the wild parties he might throw in their honour. Not a bit like his Roman mythological namesake, he did at least have a daughter called Daffodil. Bacchanalian revelry was more likely to occur at nearby Fryern Court, where Kit Nicholson had designed a studio for the painter and carouser Augustus John, but invitations were not extended. In late November, bang in the middle of the Blitz, Grove End Road was hit. Amazingly, Essie was home alone when a bomb fell in the next garden. The blast wrecked the house that had been Number 6. Antony, having stepped outside to watch the unfolding raid, leapt for his life. With pipes and windows shattered, Acomb Lodge sustained further structural damage demanding eventual demolition. Essie and Antony escaped unscathed, as did Harold’s two concert grand pianos on a floor of smashed glass. The Craxtons were lucky and John was luckiest of all. When E.Q. and her family moved to Alderholt Mill House in January 1941, he was allotted the attic. Domestic harmony with the Piggotts had been strained by black ink spilt on a valuable carpet. John and E.Q. set to work painting over the chocolate-brown woodwork and dreary wallpapers of the previous occupant in bright white and blotting out red-brick fireplaces too. E.Q. was an ‘instinctive transformer’ and in no time she had created a haven of ‘optimism and light’ with Nicholson paintings (by William, Mabel, Winifred and Ben) on the whitened walls, and sofas and chairs, cushions, curtains and bedspreads in fabrics with mostly organic motifs designed and printed either by E.Q. (who had studied batik in Paris) or Nancy Nicholson working from her own lino blocks. What John enjoyed as a ‘glorious nonconformity’ – making for an air of joyful freedom – came through inspired juxtaposition of the antique, austere, hand-made and light-hearted: The furniture in the large living room was an unlikely mixture of distressed, painted Regency chairs, strictly functional Alvar Aalto tables and stools, a Breuer chaise-longue and a large Marion Dorn carpet. Along one wall was a huge architect’s plan chest, above the fireplace a superb Winifred Nicholson and on the fireplace E.Q.’s amusing collection of white kitsch rococo vases which looked at their best filled with snowdrops.2 What the new tenants called ‘the Millerie’ was also a house of music. E.Q. introduced John to twentieth-century works by Berg, Poulenc, Roussel, Satie, Tippett and Kurt Weill, and converted him to jazz via the Benny Goodman Quartet, the Gramercy Five, Lionel Hampton and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. Mr Bacchus may have disappointed in the party department, but soon E.Q.’s dance music drew American airmen from a nearby base – who taught

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their hosts to jitterbug. John became addicted. His only public statement save for his art during the war was to be a sardonic letter in the News Chronicle after the athletic partnered dance was decried as debauchery. E.Q. had grown up with 16 servants; so caring, with scant help, for two evacuees, three children and John Craxton was a tall order. Not naturally maternal, she overflowed with fun by way of compensation. And further to escape the strictures of war, she took up painting – producing, under John’s influence, simplified images of pots, fruit and flowers as well as garden views and landscapes strikingly like his. She said: ‘We really had rather a pleasant war … Looking after the chickens and gardening and painting. Looking after John Craxton and the children.’3 Thanks to E.Q., John was now getting into his artistic stride as a landscape painter. ‘It was in her hospitable house that I really started to find myself’, he remembered – adding: ‘The great elemental landscapes were too monumental for me at the time, and I preferred the more intimate places: metamorphic fallen trees, mill-houses and cart-tracks were closer to my temperament.’4 He now made a first sale of a drawing – to an illustrator of children’s books and china, and friend of E.Q., who lived in Wiltshire’s Savernake Forest. Mabel Lucie Attwell and John enjoyed the joke when her innocent captions acquired double entendres in more knowing decades to come. Through the menaced spring and summer of 1941, John moved between Alderholt and London. The Craxtons had regrouped round the corner from Acomb Lodge at 8 Abbey Road Mansions, in a four-room flat plus kitchen and bathroom. John’s tiny bedroom overlooked recording studios opened by Edward Elgar in 1931, where musicians could be seen chatting and smoking in the yard. He was now working on his first solo show, thanks to a neighbour who ran the Swiss Cottage Café. An émigré from central Europe, she aimed to re-create grand continental café culture in what the artist called a ‘peeling stucco greasy spoon’. He supplied seven paintings and told E.Q. that prices of up to six guineas had ‘caused a sensation in the family’. It would have been more sensational had anything actually sold. That August – nearly two years into a war bringing nothing but retreat and siege, and with a lull in air raids only because Axis forces were now sweeping through the Soviet Union – no one was in a buying mood. John did at least meet a young Greek Cypriot actor named Michael Yannis. Later he would become Michael Cacoyannis, director of the film Zorba the Greek. Cultural London had virtually shut down at the outbreak of war, with museum, theatre and concert-hall closures. It was a call to action for Kenneth Clark, who would become one of John Craxton’s most loyal patrons. Born into enormous wealth and isolation, he had taken refuge in pictures – emerging as a collector and connoisseur who held that art was the preserve of all. Keeper of Western Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from the age of 27, where he arranged an extension funded by an anonymous benefactor (actually himself), this phenomenon was appointed director of the National Gallery, in 1933, at 30. A liberal humanist – who once said ‘We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and

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disillusion just as effectively as by bombs’ – he went on to fight a shining cultural war against Fascist darkness. Once the Trafalgar Square gallery had lost its treasures to a disused Welsh slate mine, the director oversaw an unparalleled enjoyment of beauty in a building of empty frames. He set up the War Artists Advisory Committee, allowing 200 creative talents to work as official war artists and some to exhibit on freed-up National Gallery walls (though his main motive was to save their lives). Here Henry Moore unveiled his uplifting drawings of nocturnal shelterers in the London Underground. The sleeping figures were cast like petrified volcanic victims of Pompeii, except that these reclining human forms were still resolutely living, carrying on in a new normal in the eye of the Blitz: everyman and everywoman at our most extraordinary. John Craxton saw this and other displays of contemporary art – admiring work by Graham Sutherland and John Piper in particular – in the marvellous, makeshift schedule of wartime. From 1942 the popular exhibition series ran alongside a rolling ‘picture of the month’ programme where a single work from the permanent collection was reclaimed from subterranean safety to hang amid unprecedented illumination, with removal to the basement each night. When in London John never failed to soak up the instruction in a solitary masterpiece from the past. He would always remember his arrested astonishment on first seeing the Nicolas Poussin painting of a bacchanalian revel before a statue of Pan – a vision of Arcadia in a world of war. John was introduced to Kenneth Clark thanks to the wider musical family of the Craxtons being enlisted into what became the National Gallery’s foremost wartime campaign. Pianist Myra Hess, an old friend of Harold and Essie, organised 1,698 morale-raising lunchtime concerts and performed in 146 herself – a Jew of German origin airing German music (Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann) through the Blitz and beyond, when the Trafalgar Square gallery was hit nine times. At the debut recital she expected to be booed for her alien name and programme, but everyone cheered. Harold made several appearances and his pupils many more; Nina Milkina played Mozart – whose birthday she shared. As well as the musical menu, John recalled tea-and-sandwich lunches served by ‘la-di-da ladies from Chelsea’. Asked later why an audience above 750,000 had relished such an uncompromising score, Dame Myra said: ‘Everybody was very busy during the war and there was nobody to tell the people that this sort of music was over their heads. So they came and liked it.’5 Only a few would have recognised, among all the visiting musicians, Kenneth Clark occasionally playing the triangle. Now everything was coming together for John Craxton just when it was in prime danger of falling apart. Still, there were significant near misses. James Iliff, the Craxtons’ lodger, had been at Bryanston School in Dorset – on the estate whose grounds Tanta Waller landscaped – with Lucian Freud. Told by James that John was someone he should meet, Lucian had turned up at Acomb Lodge. John was in Dorset at the time, so Lucian had left a note – but they were not to meet

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until many months later. In the meantime, John had dropped a line to Peter Watson from Alderholt. The patron replied with ideas and advice on painting: I am sure the only really important thing is to submit to a certain discipline in drawing when learning and then to do exactly as one feels naturally inclined. In such a time as this everything is permissible: the difficulty is to do anything successfully… Great painting must have a synthesis of conscious & unconscious, of prose as well as poetry. Also the poetry in a picture is not necessarily in the execution or in the subject. It is an essence which only the superior painter can impart … I tend to admire works by those who have great experience of life (Goya, Michelangelo, Delacroix, Picasso). It shows in their work. I agree that each new work must be a new adventure, a new discovery. Life renews itself every day and always comes back to strengthen the creator however much he may despair at moments … Yes, telephone me when you come up. I will be happy to see you again: we will talk. Hurrying back to London, and dispensing with the phone call, John made a beeline for Palace Gate in Kensington – where Peter Watson lived in an ultramodernist flat designed by Wells Coates, a follower of Le Corbusier. The door was opened by a ‘swarthy, Spanish-looking gentleman’ whom John took to be the butler. This was in fact the painter Robert MacBryde, whose artist partner, Robert Colquhoun, appeared later. The two Scots exiles were lodging in the one-bedroom flat, testing the largesse of their momentarily absent host to the limit. They slept and worked in a long living room amid art by modern British makers Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Christopher Wood, John Tunnard and the unknown Lucian Freud – alongside others by Klee, Renoir, Soutine, Picasso, Miró and Max Ernst. At Palace Gate the Watson boys saw Horizon proofs and kept up with recent artistic developments in France and the rest of Europe via Cahiers d’Art, Verve, Minotaure and Revue Blanche magazines. There was new music to hear (Bartók, Berg, Schoenberg) and books to borrow – John catching up on missed reading through steadily devouring works by Kafka and Rimbaud, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and illustrated art tomes on topics ranging from the late Gothic German Renaissance and Giuseppe Arcimboldo – the sixteenth-century court painter who constructed bizarre imaginative portraits via gorgeously rendered assemblies of fruit, vegetables and flowers – to Poussin, the North African journal of Delacroix, and Picasso’s neoclassical period of the 1920s. All this, and then the art education regularly altering on the walls. Like Peter Watson, the two Roberts disdained the basement shelter during air raids, preferring to risk it amid the art and artists – or out on the razzle in the world of waifs and strays. Deciding that John needed to be taken in hand, to

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complete his social education (he retained a look of deceptive innocence), they guided him around the pubs and clubs of Soho. All hell could break loose in their drunken company, with punches and glasses thrown. John was treated kindly – the Roberts approved of his art and he had the protection of their patron, who paid for their beer and their breakages along with everything else. The heart of Soho lies in four parallel streets – Wardour, Dean, Frith, Greek – with Old Compton Street running across them. Home to the illicit and exotic for centuries, this unsquare mile is bounded to the north by Oxford Street, south by Shaftesbury Avenue, west by Regent Street and east by Charing Cross Road: a compact centre of artists and artisans, poets and prostitutes, craftsmen and criminals; a sensory world of otherness whose traits and flavours have been ever changing (French, Italian, Jewish, Greek, Cypriot, Chinese). Through all the changes, the childhood home of William Blake, in Broadwick Street, survived until the 1960s. For the two Roberts and so many more, the bohemian glass overspilled beyond Oxford Street into the pubs of Fitzrovia and north-east to Bloomsbury and the Museum Tavern opposite the British Museum. John Craxton was an eager explorer here, though for him the main attraction was always the talking rather than the drinking. He found further appeal in the foreign foods served in and around Soho – also being taken by Peter Watson to Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street, where home-grown oysters (Pyfleets, West Merseys, Whitstables) went unrationed through the Blitz. The twin wobbly pillars of Fitzrovia were Augustus John and Nina Hamnett, painter friends born in the sedate seaside Pembrokeshire town of Tenby and in revolt against its Victorian conventions ever since. John Craxton had already bumped into Augustus in The Greyhound pub in Fordingbridge when with E.Q. Nicholson. That had been an ordeal because the art celebrity was ‘sozzled on gin – pink rats were jumping out of his eyes’; he had focused sufficiently to rail at E.Q. over the leaking roof of his Kit Nicholson-designed studio. Now in the Fitzroy Tavern, John listened as Nina talked of cavorting in Paris with Modigliani, Picasso, Diaghilev and Cocteau – trading memories for the next drink. Her current predilection was for sailors ‘because they leave in the morning’. Augustus proved an even better raconteur; his enthralling memoir was being serialised in Horizon. At a Cézanne exhibition, with an arm around John’s shoulder, he said: ‘Wonderful to know when to leave off.’ As John turned 19, Peter showed him the proofs of two sepia drawings from 1825 by Samuel Palmer, lately acquired by the Ashmolean Museum and now being reproduced in the November issue of Horizon with an appreciation by poet Geoffrey Grigson. John had never heard of Palmer and even in dull proof form Early Morning and The Valley Thick with Corn, inspired by the Kent village of Shoreham, were revelatory: exultant images rendered with crisp linear clarity and an enfolding light. The impression of bucolic abundance had a special potency in the nadir of war. Such a vision also demonstrated the might of the imagination, for Palmer – like the Norwich School artists John Crome and

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The Valley Thick with Corn by Samuel Palmer, 1825 Ink on paper, 18.2 × 27.5 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

John Sell Cotman, whom the young John Craxton also came to admire – had produced his paradisal pictures amid rural unrest in the hardship following the Napoleonic Wars, when light in the countryside was fuelled by torched barns and hayricks. That October David Cecil asked John to paint a fireplace in his Oxford college rooms, prompting a turning point on a personal and painterly journey. A resulting tree in grey, yellow and green met the artist’s aim for ‘realism through abstraction’. Peter Watson went too, and they shared a hotel bed – leaving Peter to coin the word ‘Kraxy’ for sexy. John met friends of Peter, including the photographer and designer Cecil Beaton and Lord Berners – composer, novelist, painter and grand eccentric. When John left to stay with E.Q.’s father, Peter went to the Arts and Crafts Wilsford Manor, near Salisbury, for a house party hosted by aesthete Stephen Tennant. Deeply smitten with his latest discovery, the patron wrote: My dearest Johnnie, How sweet and Kraxy you were in Oxford – even the awful bridal suite was quite transformed … Here it is lovely. The house is more amazing than ever – pink & blue marbling everywhere, camellia trees in full bloom, Stephen Spender, E.M. Forster and Elizabeth Bowen to talk to – delicious. The war might not exist – in fact I think there is a conspiracy to keep Stephen Tennant from realising its existence. I hope I will see you on Thursday when I come to London. I hear you have been sleeping foal-like on the sofa. How nice. But please do not get me into a row with Mrs Craxton … If you go to the flat remember to look at the

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Picasso and Altdorfer books. Take them away if you would like to borrow them as I want you to see them. Fondest love Peter But John Craxton had just found the book of his life. In Oxford he had dazzled the don Nevill Coghill, W.H. Auden’s former tutor. Tall and leonine, Nevill was leading John along Broad Street in a beguiling spell of talk when he dived into Blackwell’s Bookshop. Emerging minutes later, the magician presented a birthday gift – William Blake’s Poetry and Prose from the Nonesuch Press, edited by Geoffrey Keynes and reprinted in 1939. John read the book from cover to cover, marking (and learning to recite) appealing passages and adding comments of his own. It was the ideal moment to come upon William Blake: He was the perfect person to latch on to in a war because there was this determination to do what he believed in. He was a romantic artist re-creating the world in his image, and a linear artist too. How true his words that ‘the great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art’. John picked out a particularly appealing sentence championing art of the imagination over imitation: No Man of Sense ever supposes that copying from Nature is the Art of Painting; if Art is no better than this, it is no better than any other Manual Labour; anybody may do it & the fool often will do it best as it is a work of no Mind. Then his pencil found the passage that reflected his exuberant spirit but would land reader and author in trouble. They both loved to laugh, not least in mockery of the less enlightened. When repeatedly provoked, their targets were more and more likely to retaliate: Frequent laughing has been called a sign of a little mind – while the scarcer smile of harmless quiet has been complimented as the mark of a noble heart – But to abstain from laughter, and exciting laughter, merely not to offend, or to risk giving offence, or not to debase the inward dignity of character – is a power unknown to many a vigorous mind. I hate scarce smiles: I love laughing.

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DREAMER IN LANDSCAPE

John stopped laughing late in 1941 when a dreaded letter arrived at Abbey Road Mansions. Ordered to report for a medical examination, he was being marched into the machinery of war. His brother Tim was an airforce hero and Robin joined the army as soon as war began; but Antony – 6ft 3in and barely eight stone – had been ruled unfit for armed service and was now starting a BBC career. John was almost as tall and only slightly heavier, and for all his nervy energy he was often out for the count. He longed to be exempted from the army but, for once, doubted his luck. Summoned to a cold and crowded hall in Bloomsbury, on Tuesday 16 December, he awaited his turn in a cubicle made from suspended and battened sheets. He had with him the Blake volume and a pencil, and soon added two lines to the end of the text: The doctors come My hope is insignificant Then, over the last three pages and endpapers, he was driven in hours of extremis to compose four surreal poems. Each owed something to David Gascoyne in a nightmarish stream of subconsciousness. Two without titles were written in the queue to see a doctor: some concocted dream fantastic in its simplicity spectacles spectacles bare arms bare feet is this Crete this maze of whitened screens battened like a maze is the Minotaur walking this cotton maze this ersatz maze. He came out. He tried to keep himself up his lips were weak

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my heart is weak Christ I am weak my heart sweats my mind breathes backwards like some bad dream the processes go on & forward. Where? In the big room lined with sheets to waiting sections – sinister Hell? trial? Christ when will it end am I resigned the waiting heads crowned with matted Brilliantine expectant eyes – frightened sinister for us paper souls on paper futures in the ink pot pens that change a lifetime. Waiting it seems for nothing murmuring voices deathly padded movements Am I alive or is This death a dream The third poem, ‘The Journey’, was written after the examination, while John awaited judgement: walking jogging pushing forward to the turning point – the made up death point – surely not death

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on poppy day? The one Flanders poppy triumphant red glowing on every button hole on every breast an ersatz flower behind the flower an ersatz soul. Through the green [???] mind the Bloomsbury Drama draws nearer. The staked The abrupt ending suggests the moment that John was called to hear his fate. In his state of panic the military jargon made no sense, so a sergeant spelt out the medical verdict: ‘You’d be as much use to the war effort as a three-legged horse.’ While hanging on again for his exemption papers, on the grounds of supposed pleurisy, an elated John Craxton had time to convey his feelings in a poem called ‘The Finish’: my soul is at rest the play is ended the Hero comes through triumphant now he will go forward! onward! free! Rushing to the National Gallery to celebrate deliverance, he bumped into Eric Kennington. His old mentor was an official war artist for a second time, but John could not resist sharing his relief at being spared conscription. The shrewd Kennington said: ‘You have to prove yourself an artist worth saving.’ So John went home and, over Christmas week of 1941, produced his first masterpiece. Poet in Landscape is an ink and watercolour drawing of complete conviction – the assurance of the artist proclaimed in every detail, and in the eviction of the indefinite article from the title. The foreground figure, modelled by Janet reading a book while seated on a chest of drawers, really refers to the artist himself studying William Blake during his army medical. The view of Samuel Palmer is here reversed: rather than finding refuge in a rural landscape, the closed-eyed poet is escaping from a field of menace into his own interior vision. Palmeresque corn sheaves have given way to seeding onion plants – whose skittle-like shapes the artist practised on endpapers of a second Blake volume – and they are being mown down by a marauding tree. Like the toppled yews of Kingley Vale, the horizontal trunk appears to have thrashed across the scene, where it has certainly punctured a leaf in a corner of the picture. Scythe-like branches reflect a crescent moon whose illumination reveals vulnerability and violence. Such romantic symbols were now known as ‘Bomber Moons’ for defying blackout rules and letting the Luftwaffe in. The

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Poet in Landscape, 1941 Ink and watercolour on paper, 53.5 × 75 cm. John Craxton Estate

poster image for British Neo-Romantic art created months before the term was coined by critic Raymond Mortimer, Poet in Landscape was bought by Peter Watson. The following week, the first of 1942, saw a second tour de force of imagination and draughtsmanship. Dreamer in Landscape depicts a boy modelled by Felix Braun, a 16-year-old Jewish refugee from Vienna then lodging with the Craxtons. He and a brother escaped via Kindertransport; their sister was murdered. The figure, with eyes shut and fingers placed reflectively on face and temple, is retreating into himself from a position of moonlit peril. Twisting and writhing foliage seems to have been caught in a strafing searchlight and an exposed tree is echoing the defensive stance of the human model by hugging its branches around its trunk. Both drawings appeared in Horizon in March 1942, with the artist paid £10 for the honour. In February Peter Watson wrote: My dear Johnnie, I thought you would like to see your proofs … Do me a nice white ink drawing will you? A big one – full of mystery. It’s the only thing left which is not ersatz…

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I am sending you a cheque because I feel that you may need it and that you really deserve it. Those two pictures we are reproducing are really most remarkable – perhaps I have not been emphatic enough about them. You can be quite sure that there is no younger artist in this country or elder for that matter of your generation that can produce such work. In March he wrote again: My dearest Johnny, I sent off a copy of the mag and I hope it has been forwarded to wherever you may be … I am pleased with the reproductions. I hope you will be too and that everyone including James will be proud of Johnnie. Your nice letter from Wales arrived. I am so glad you went there – it seems to be having a highly stimulating effect on you which is always good for one. There is little news to send you. I feel I die a thousand deaths every day but that is getting quite usual for me. Please let me know when you come back: London is even greyer when you are away. Fond love, Peter PS I have photographed the Sutherland gouache as I want to put it in the next number. PPS I have a new Picasso water-gouache, delicious. PPPS Read the Kafka story in the Horizon [‘The Penal Colony’]. It’s marvellous. Appearing without comment, the reproductions alone announced a terrific talent. Horizon now packed a big cultural punch, with a circulation far weightier than its 8,000 monthly sales suggested. Limited by strict paper rationing, every issue sold out swiftly and copies were widely shared. Its main rival, Penguin New Writing, edited by John Lehmann and printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, had ten times as many sales thanks to big paper stocks. But Horizon would be better regarded and remembered. If the journal depended on the Peter Watson wallet, it was defined by the critical tastes and paradoxical personality of Cyril Connolly, who made most of the editorial decisions and whose social contacts became contributors. He entertained in style both at work and at home. John never knew who he might meet in Cyril’s company, but could be sure of intriguing,

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Dreamer in Landscape, 1942 Ink and chalk on paper, 55 × 76 cm. Tate

influential arts practitioners and patrons – and unbounded hospitality bankrolled by Peter. The two illustrated images set a wartime Craxton pattern, where a solitary figure – called poet, shepherd, dreamer or dancer – was an emblematic selfportrait. But, however frustrated and dissatisfied, the artist was never lonely, let alone hermetic: throughout the Blitz – thanks in large part to Horizon’s founders – he was in a social whirl. Art was from the imagination; life was for the living: Between 1941 and 1945, before I went to Greece, I drew and occasionally painted landscapes with shepherds or poets as single figures. The landscapes were entirely imaginary; the shepherds were also invented – I had never seen a shepherd. They were my means of escape and a sort of self-protection. A shepherd is a lone figure, and so is a poet. I wanted to safeguard a world of private mystery.1 He had in fact seen shepherds in Sussex and Dorset but was also willing to erase any figure from an image to concentrate the power in the scene. In March 1942 E.Q. managed to save enough rationed petrol to reach Llanthony Priory in the Black Mountains of Monmouthshire. The Norman and Gothic priory,

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Left: Moonlit Landscape, 22 March 1942 Gouache and ink on paper, 45 × 54.6 cm. John Craxton Estate Right: Photograph of Moonlit Landscape showing overpainted shepherd and dog

ravaged in Welsh and English battles long before the dissolution of the monasteries, was a metaphor for destruction and decay in depictions by artists from J.M.W. Turner to John Piper. John Craxton added a dramatic twist by conjuring up a tree to bear down like a battering ram on the ruins. This metamorphic war machine has every branch as a weapon – catapult, sickle, lance – with a lost limb on the ground a thrown spear. The split trunk seems poised to crush the priory shell like a walnut in a nutcracker. The overt human element is off-picture. It may have been a moment when John was least inclined towards the solitary figure. His relationship with E.Q. became so intense for a time that Lucian Freud suspected an affair. Another work from 22 March 1942, made in Alderholt, reveals a rocky Welsh or Dorset wasteland with oddly animal-like topography. When held up to the light one painted-over hill is shown to be a burial mound for a crouching shepherd and his dog, erased from the original composition and left to sleep beneath the pigment. On the same day John annotated a postcard of a hilly landscape with birds, cow, moon and foliage, and then he mailed it to Essie with the dashed off message: Thank you much for letter – hope to see razor soon. Could you post as soon as able – my clothes coupon book need 16 coupons – for cord trousers & new jersey which I have paid for & are still in Wales. Had a lovely time – doing a few pictures I need my old ration book – yes? love always John. An artist of rare independence remained a demanding son and sorely in need of further sponsorship.

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JOHN AND LUCIAN

Shortly before Grove End Road was bombed, Essie Craxton had opened the door to a blitz of a youth with a German accent and ‘long hair like Struwwelpeter’ – the unkempt character in the nineteenth-century German children’s story. His name was Lucian Freud. Told that his quarry was in Dorset, he left a note in a deranged scrawl promising to return. To a more conventional parent it would have read as a threat. Lucian was evidently distracted even before blagging his way into the Merchant Navy and joining a North Atlantic convoy to Nova Scotia. His contribution to the war effort was really a quixotic bid to reach New York and track down Judy Garland due to a passion for The Wizard of Oz. Ill after a perilous crossing, and with no yellow brick road in sight, he decided against desertion and instead completed the dangerous homeward journey. He was then discharged with acute tonsillitis. After hospital treatment, he was relieved to be weak enough, and mentally alert enough, to fail an army medical. Legend claimed that examiners were spooked by his concern for a

Lucian Freud

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(non-existent) kitten and his fondness for fire. Someone once asked Lucian why he hadn’t joined up and he replied with characteristic wit: ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ In the meantime, John had tried repeatedly to contact Lucian – with the assistance of their mothers but without success. Now an amended compliments slip from the Café Royal arrived at Abbey Road Mansions. The monogram of the grand Victorian relic on Regent’s Street, once the haunt of Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm and still an oasis for artists with a yen for faded glory, had been embellished into a heraldic shield incorporating vividly drawn horse, elephant, bird and human head. The printed message had been extended in a child-like script to read: ‘With Mr Freud’s wishes of wellbeing and of course The Café Royal’s best compliments!’ What an enticement. Then came the letter: Dear Jonny, How terrible that we kept on missing even the phone number at which you told my mother to ring you, when I rang they said the line has been out of order for six month! Thanks for your letter! I am just doing just finishing a picture of the hospital which is GOOD! I am going to ring you… Monday before lunch at mai 1992, this little game that fate and the older generation of Craxtons is playing must be put a stop to … My best compliments to Mrs C! When I ring my name will be Mr BRAHMSKATZ which I think sounds pretty musical and respectable. Love to Pete! if he’s there Lucian As the letter was posted when the sender was about to leave for a Suffolk art school, the pen pals continued to keep a distance. Their paths finally crossed in London. And all at once John and Lucian were thick as thieves – co-conspirators against any kind of conformity or commonplace tedium; crazily creative and intelligent; allied artists working entirely as they wished. As John remembered: I was in Peter’s flat one evening towards the end of 1941 when Lucian turned up, wearing a chic brown suit and looking very handsome … He had incredible eyes and was very quick witted. He had a fantastic, riveting personality. When Samuel Palmer was 19 he had a seminal meeting with the 67-year-old William Blake. John’s first meeting with Lucian was still more significant, since both raw visionaries were 19, John being the elder by just 66 days. Closer to lovers than brothers, they were spirited twins – although, even at their closest,

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The Café Royal’s compliments slip amended by Lucian Freud, 1941 Drawing: ink on paper, 17.5 × 11.3 cm

too individual to be anywhere near identical. Just then Lucian was working in the attic of a flat rented by the newly married Stephen and Natasha Spender at 2 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead; his own family lived downstairs. Now he took to dropping in at Abbey Road Mansions at all hours, to be taken under Essie’s wing. Raised in Berlin until three months from his eleventh birthday, Lucian was famously the grandson of the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. He and his elder brother, Stephen, and younger brother, Clement, were born at 16-month intervals and given middle names of archangels (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael) by their parents, Lucie and Ernst. By their teenage years in England any sense of divine or mortal order had dissipated into rivalry and devilry – due chiefly to the tearaway nature of Lucian. Before he could articulate his talent, he was liable to express himself by lashing out with fists and feet.

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Like John, he had crashed through formal education, until removed from Bryanston after dropping his trousers in a Bournemouth street. He feuded with or froze out his brothers until they ceased speaking at all. Lucian chafed against the yoke of being his mother’s favourite – flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, name of her name – and he was aware of the rumour, spread by Stephen and Clement, that he was the fruit of his mother’s affair with an artist during a brief rupture in the parental marriage. Here the parallel between the two friends broke, for John was never remotely burdened by a primary claim on Essie’s attention. Despite a lightweight reputation among his children, Ernst had rare foresight – arranging his immediate family’s flight to England by September 1933, when the Nazi writing was on the wall in Berlin but few were minded to read it. A table of his design followed, with money in a hollow leg. Eager to replicate past happiness, Ernst, a Bauhaus-style architect of some note, created the Hidden House in Walberswick (after a holiday retreat on the Baltic island of Hiddensee), that Lucian alone came to hate. He loathed the Suffolk village’s summer art colony – scorning ‘all the amateur lady artists wearing amber necklaces’.1 Lucian preferred the radical, French atelier-style East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, formed by artist-plantsman Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines in the Essex village of Dedham. When Ernst protested at the unsavoury pictures being produced, Peter Watson offered to pay the fees. Morris’s portraits had been ridiculed as ‘shrieking likenesses’ and Lucian worked in a similarly strident mode – with roots far closer to German Expressionism than to France. His incendiary talent proved exactly that when, painting late one night with fellow student David Carr, smouldering cigarette butts were added to paint rags in a wastepaper basket and by morning the school had burned to the ground. Lucian continued to be welcomed, or at least tolerated, by the founders for a time and he went on to the school’s final base at Benton End in Hadleigh, where John Craxton was a visitor too. Ernst’s parents and other relatives had to be prised from Austria after its annexation by Germany in 1938, with a ransom paid by disciple and former patient Princess Marie Bonaparte – the super-rich wife of Prince George of Greece, who had been Commissioner for Crete during its transition from Ottoman to Greek rule. She then used royal connections to get the Freuds naturalised as British citizens in time to avoid wartime internment. Safe in ‘lovely, free, generous England’, the ailing Sigmund was installed at 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead by September. Amid a careful reassembly of his Viennese flat, he wrote, saw a few patients and Salvador Dali, cherished his antiquities and died from jaw cancer a year later, three weeks into the Second World War. His ashes were left in an Ancient Greek funerary urn in Golders Green Crematorium. His estate was divided between his children, with Lucian and five other grandchildren sharing publishing royalties and each receiving a leather purse filled with gold coins.

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Lucian took John to Sunday lunches with his parents – then on to the Spender flat in the same building. The painters were snapped on the balcony with Tony Hyndman, Stephen’s erstwhile partner, who hung around despite the Spender marriage to concert pianist Natasha Litvin in the spring of 1941. John already knew Stephen through Peter Watson and Horizon, and Natasha was familiar to the Craxton family since she was the illegitimate daughter of Harold’s collaborator, the music critic Edwin Evans. Her piano playing won praise at Acomb Lodge, and she would always be grateful to Essie for cycling through the Blitz, formal dresses stuffed into her bicycle basket – riding to the rescue of young performers with severely rationed wardrobes. John designed a beautiful bookplate for the couple as a belated wedding present. Natasha, who had cause to feel excluded from so much of the life of her questingly homosexual husband, was grateful that, to the scorn of Cyril Connolly (‘who thought you should never share your library with anyone, least of all your wife’2), John had given the Spenders a joint dedication. From Lucian’s family flat, he and John then went on to his late grandfather’s house, nine doors away. Already the future museum resembled a secular shrine. Lucian’s grandmother, Martha was now also grieving for her sister Minna, who had helped run the household in Vienna and London. Her devoted Austrian maid, Paula Fichtl, had lately been released after nearly a year’s internment on the Isle of Man; her chow, Jofi, had served six months in quarantine. The house of mourning and exile felt hugely burdened but Sigmund’s analyst daughter, Anna, and her friend Dorothy Burlingham, were keeping the Freudian legacy alive – seeing child patients, running the Hampstead War Nursery and tending the flame of psychoanalytical research. Lucian and John had access to the combined ground-floor study, library and consulting room containing Sigmund’s personal relics. They took turns to lie on the legendary couch covered with an antique Persian rug, and inspected the late patriarch’s extensive collection of ancient things – principally Egyptian, Greek and Roman figures. Loving the sense of harmony and healing in those perfected forms, he had compared the psychoanalyst’s penetration of the human psyche, through layers of buried memory, with an archaeological dig. Among the ‘old friends’ facing Sigmund on his desk, so strokable as he talked or listened, John admired a statue of Athena smuggled out of Austria by Marie Bonaparte weeks before she returned for her mentor. Lucian was further drawn to the Freudian library of textbooks on medicine and criminology, and especially to illustrations of syphilitics and murder victims: he always had a taste for the macabre and grotesque. Meanwhile, back in Vienna and beyond rescue, Sigmund’s four aged sisters were destined for death camps. For John and Lucian life was electrified in the present moment – with the promise of a bright future alongside the bracing daily risk of annihilation. They bicycled everywhere, with most danger seemingly posed by bits of metal from anti-aircraft guns. ‘You heard them pinging all over the place.’ Every morning and evening brought a new adventure. Jane Howard found out what that could

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mean when she and John went with Lucian to the seedy Mayfair enclave of Shepherd Market, where he knocked on a door: A lady answered the door of what even then I could see very clearly was a brothel. He said, ‘Get us all a cup of tea dear, will you?’ And she said, ‘Of course, Loochie.’ So we sat in a downstairs waiting room and had tea.3 In the New Year of 1942, Peter Watson read an article by Joan Miró called ‘Je rêve d’un grand atelier’ and concluded that John must also be dreaming of a large studio. So he wrote: ‘How much do studios cost in this awful place? Anyway here is £50 for a start. Look for something delicious and let me know all.’ With so many fleeing the London Blitz, rental properties abounded – and John found ideal premises at 14 Abercorn Place, round the corner from Abbey Road Mansions. In a stuccoed early Victorian terrace with Ionic columns framing the front door, a light and airy maisonette was available for £40 a year. A first-floor layout of front studio with balcony, back kitchen and storeroom was mostly reprised on the second via a front studio and back bedroom, and with a bathroom on top. Peter approved the discovery but had reservations on learning that Lucian was pressing to share it. (‘Yes, perhaps it would be nice to have Luxic up top but you must be quiet or the muse will never call.’) The benefactor backed the plan after John promised that the new base was for painting rather than partying. While John slept in the Craxton flat each night, Lucian seized the chance to escape from his family and moved into his new studio. John arrived early each morning and the pair worked separately in north-facing rooms until lunchtime, when they bicycled to the Warrington Hotel in Maida Vale – with a tiled, moulded and marbled interior reputedly a posh Victorian brothel – for its beer and jukebox. Then another prolonged work session until pub, club or cinema outings in the evening, and probably supper with the Craxtons. Of course they partied. The boon companions toured Soho, which Lucian already knew well. Dressed in baggy Merchant Navy-style blue jeans, they called at the Ritz bar on Piccadilly or the Café Royal on Regent Street, but their main haunt was the Coffee An’, an

14 Abercorn Place

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all-night café in an alley off Charing Cross Road. Boris, the chess-playing Russian proprietor, used the cryptic title for a suggestive promise (coffee plus talk, snacks and sex). John said: ‘It was a rough house with porno-erotic pictures on the wall and an incredible range of customers: intellectuals, draft dodgers, people looking for a pick up.’ During one police raid John and Lucian were briefly arrested as suspected deserters. Here they mingled with louche artist exiles from Paris: Surrealist painters Toni del Renzio and John Banting – Lucian being fascinated by the latter’s syphilitic nose – and painter, model and muse Isabel Delmer. John tasted future freedom here: ‘I went upstairs to a Cypriot gaming house and they gave me Greek coffee … in this quiet place of escape from all the clamour below.’ When the Coffee An’ closed, Boris opened the Mandrake Club in Meard Street, where he held up the resident cat and bawled: ‘The only virgin here tonight!’ And they loved the York Minister in Dean Street – better known as the French House – with its benign patron, Victor Berlemont. ‘Will you cash a cheque?’ John asked. ‘No’, said Victor. ‘I will lend you a pound.’ Everyone smoked: John puffed away on Gauloises while others wheezed on Woodbines. At the French pub he developed a taste for Pernod. The lure for Free French forces stayed open while Soho became pocked with bomb craters. John was in the French pub on 8 March 1941 when, falling through a ventilation shaft, two bombs exploded in the basement ballroom of the Café de Paris in nearby Coventry Street. The blasts stopped the song ‘Oh Johnny Oh’ dead – killing crooner Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and more than thirty musicians, diners and foxtrotting dancers. ‘We all felt the shudder’, John said. ‘But it wasn’t us, so we carried on.’4 Opposite the French, St Anne’s, Soho, a church consecrated in 1686, was reduced to a shell by three direct hits – leaving a remnant of Dean Street façade and a tower on Wardour Street. The last blast also shattered every French pub window. James Pope-Hennessy called St Anne’s ‘the most melancholy and so the loveliest of all the air-raid ruins’ but for John and Lucian it was a playground after drinks chez Victor Berlemont. They climbed the tower and, with Dutch courage, walked on exposed rafters like tightropes. They drank at Le Petit Club Français in St James’s, ate patisserie at Maison Bertaux in Greek Street, and thought they had made another clever discovery next-door, in Rosa’s restaurant, when joining French soldiers and sailors ordering steak and chips. On the fourth visit the steak was found to be horsemeat – Lucian’s favourite animal. After that it was boudin and mashed potato at Chez Auguste in Old Compton Street. Seeing themselves as renegades, they enjoyed the company of outcasts and outlaws at a time when the blackout provided a cover for villainy. ‘Lucian had great originality and devilment’, John said. ‘With steel-capped boots he would kick in plate-glass windows and yell in pubs about “Filthy Yids!”’ He was responding not just to Hitler but to casual anti-Semitism in London. When wearing tartan trousers on the Tube, he was asked the name

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of his Scottish clan. ‘I have no clan’, said Lucian. ‘Looks like the Jordan Highlanders’, the questioner murmured to a companion. Lucian would sprawl in a gutter while John pretended to kick him until a passer-by cried ‘Shame on you!’ In thrall to movies, they were given a wide berth when re-enacting, in darkened streets, scenes from the German silent horror film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. As for money, Lucian had found and steadily spent the bags of gold coins left to him and his brothers by their grandfather. The emptied purses were brought to Abbey Road Mansions where John burned them. Soho held a peacock circus: the self-styled King of Poland, the racing tipster Prince Monolulu, red-haired model Quentin Crisp (‘one of the stately homos of England’) and Tamil editor/publisher Meary James Thurairajah Tambimuttu – also known as Tambi or Tuttifrutti – who piloted the Poetry London periodical from 1939 with great flair, until drinking himself into disorientation and deceit. Tambi was full of ideas and fantasies, expressed in a torrent of words, given further impact by staring and widening eyes and the bending back of big double-jointed fingers. Lucian’s first printed work was for him – a drawing of a lyrebird as fierce as a phoenix. He liked the bird’s gift for mimicry; still more the pun in its name.

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BROTHERS IN ARTS

Very soon John and Lucian were inseparable – each being the first to comment on the other’s art and drawing together in John’s Abbey Road bedroom of an evening. Lucian was always scrounging materials. From using different sides of the same piece of paper they took to working on the same drawings, one continuing and finishing the other’s preliminary efforts just for fun. At times they seemed to be playing the Surrealist game ‘Exquisite Corpse’, where each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, having not seen what went before, to construct something weird and possibly enlightening. Lucian’s random associations of imagery could look as if he were playing the game alone. The pair became so interwoven that it was unclear whose art was being influenced and how. John seemed the more proficient draughtsman. He certainly worked with greater speed and spontaneity, yet each had an original wit that spurred the other to fresh imaginative flights and feats of invention. Their bond bore out Oscar Wilde’s dictum: ‘Artists, like the Greek Gods, are only revealed to one another.’ They admired and assisted each other enormously, enjoying differences as well as affinities. John longed to flee abroad but Lucian found England exotic. His foreignness was a further attraction. We respected our diversity. And nobody bothered us – we could just get on and paint. Lucian was the perfect antidote to London during the war as he had great joie de vivre and dedication to his painting. That we both influenced each other should be clear from the work of this period. It certainly wasn’t an influence of style but of method and subject matter. He had a gift for scrutinising which I tried to adopt. He would never plan a painting, either in his imagination or on the canvas, before he started; there were no preliminary studies. He just put things in as they came along, hoping for the best. It often produced extraordinary results due to his exceptional personality. Both artists were drawn to avian imagery as emblems of freedom in an era of human entrapment since birds migrated across war zones to and from besieged Britain. The falcon-like Lucian would later keep hawks, pigeons and hummingbirds. John was drawn to nightjars seen at dusk on heaths and

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Landscape with Poet and Birdcatcher, 1942 Ink, watercolour and gouache on board, 51 × 76 cm. Private collection

woodland clearings across Cranborne Chase. He admired them as eerie symbols, with a mythic ability to suck milk from goats in the dark. They embarked on a series of portrait drawings and paintings of one another; loving images: sometimes near likenesses, sometimes more symbolic, and often fired with an erotic charge, particularly on Lucian’s part. The Freud drawings of John could have a commanding presence, while never looking exactly like him. Early in their relationship John produced Landscape with Poet and Birdcatcher, where two figures appear as if in an allegory – in a moonlit ruin like Llanthony Priory. John is the seated poet and Lucian the standing bird-catcher. The poet-painter has signed and dated a fallen block of masonry as if it were a milestone – and this haunting picture was just that. In Landscape with Poet and Birdcatcher, Lucian holds a white bird with a broken wing. This may refer to Paul Gallico’s novella The Snow Goose, published in 1941 and dealing with a bird-befriending lighthouse keeper who dies rescuing British troops from Dunkirk. A bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, the sentimental story helped galvanise public opinion in America in favour of entering the war. Now the goose has evolved into a gull or dove – with an obvious visual metaphor further blurred because

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the catcher is wearing the pith hat of an African game hunter. It is unclear whether the holder is aiding an injured bird or has broken its wing in capturing it. With Lucian a lingering potential for violence often became actual. His taste for low japes and high jinx, fully shared with the pacifist John Craxton, was similarly prone to eruption. The Abercorn Place boys were amassing a collection of caps, hats and helmets as props for paintings and to hang in the hallway as part of the plot to unsettle visitors from the world of normality. In the life he wanted so passionately, John continued to be plagued by poor health. In a 1942 photo, where he is seen painting the walls of Lucian’s studio bare-chested, he looks skeletal. Bim, staying overnight with the Craxtons, wrote to Amy: ‘I saw John next morning at breakfast. He is more weedy than ever – but seems to be doing some very good work.’ Often breathless and coughing, he was sometimes confined to bed with mysterious debilitation; his energy seemed ambushed by all the excitement. Over each English summer he was afflicted with hay fever. In 1943 Lucian drew him in bed in Abbey Road Mansions during a bout of jaundice – with quinces savoured by both painters for legendary associations and symbolising the patient’s yellow skin. Jaundice passed, hay fever came and went; but, late in life, lung X-rays revealed scars from youthful tuberculosis, almost certainly the true cause of his failed army medical. Craving Greece spiritually and emotionally, he needed a dry, hot climate physically more than he knew. He also needed to marshal his resources more than he did rushing for the midnight bus from Piccadilly to get home to St John’s Wood or taking the last Tube from Oxford Circus. The two Roberts and other gay friends drank late then slept in all-night Turkish baths in Russell Square or Jermyn Street, but John was too nervous for that. On the Tube he might see George Orwell, known from Horizon parties, going home to Langford Place, off Abbey Road. Their chats continued in the Orwell flat. The novelist had published Coming Up for Air just before the war began and his masterpiece, Animal Farm, would appear soon after it ended. Pessimistic about politics, Orwell deployed an irreverent wit – daring to champion in Horizon the bawdy seaside cartoon postcards by Donald McGill that John loved. They had more in common than they realised, since both were consumptive. One would barely survive the 1940s; the other would be saved by Greece. Meanwhile, John was making the best of wartime London. Before the war he had trawled the capital’s art galleries and, among Graham Sutherland paintings admired at the Lefevre Gallery he had loved a work called Steep Road. Now here it was, hanging in Peter Watson’s Palace Gate flat, along with Sutherland’s Entrance to a Lane: I couldn’t believe it. I said to Peter, ‘I remember that picture very well’ and he said, ‘It’s for you’ and he gave it to me. I was never more excited in my life. I went back holding it tightly under my arm on the bus.

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Self-Portrait, 1942 Ink on paper laid on card, 48.2 × 38.7 cm. Private collection

Boy in Bed with Fruit by Lucian Freud, 1943 Ink on paper, 33 × 22.3 cm. Private collection

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Graham Sutherland by Lee Miller, 1943 National Portrait Gallery

John had a ‘total crush’ on Graham Sutherland from first sight of his art. ‘I felt such sympathy with the anguish in the pictures’. he said. ‘His war drawings were very exciting, too. His was a wonderful use of colour, so personal to him, impossible to copy. But he was hugely influential.’ After gifting the Sutherland painting, Peter presented the painter too – arranging a lunch with the artist and his wife in The Ivy restaurant. Wearing a black woollen suit, pink shirt and green tie, the handsome hero was dressed like one of his pictures. ‘I sat next to Kathy and she spent the entire meal talking about Graham, when all I wanted to do was talk to him’, John said. They met again in Palace Gate, where the older artist paid close attention to the Craxton drawing Poet in Landscape. ‘I wish I’d been able to do something like that when I was your age’, he said. Graham Sutherland’s manners were as good as his appearance, but beneath the surface charm he was more contradictory, with all the later prickliness of his pictures in his nature from the start. His warming to a young painter was a compliment since he tended to be wary, moody or worse where others were concerned. As Peter wrote to John in February 1942: Graham came to tea yesterday. He disconcerted me by stating his hatred of people in general. This is of course the reason why he never wishes to paint people. It is an attitude I am convinced is wrong. We must attain a new humanism or else the world will collapse into slavery for years and years. As you said, there is no man in the street. Everyone is very terrible but very wonderful too. Just as life is. Peter then set up visits to the studios of Paul Nash in Oxford and John Piper near Henley-on-Thames. John loved the symbolism and mysticism in Nash imagery, but most of all the individuality defying rigid labels. He also admired the way in which Piper’s modernist sensibility had been drafted from abstraction in the late 1930s to record an architectural heritage in danger of being destroyed by war. John stayed with the Pipers at Fawley Bottom soon after the famous royal inspection of the painter’s dark views of Windsor Castle – metaphors for Britain at war. The artist had been amused by George VI’s comment: ‘You’ve been pretty unlucky with the weather,

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Mr Piper.’ Pointing to blank paper sheets protecting the watercolours, the king had then asked: ‘Snow scenes?’ The blackened and blazing drama of Piper’s depictions were echoed in Craxton pictures of this period. He acknowledged a lasting debt in lifelong friendship with the artist and his wife, Myfanwy: His marvellous enthusiasm for colours, textures, inks, was a revelation. He showed me colours that I had not known about, monastral blue, etc. How to lay paper down, where to buy bamboo pens … I know of no one then or since who had a more penetrating understanding of what it was all about.1 With the power of the Watson chequebook, John was able to act on a belief that his inventive art needed the best equipment and materials. He patronised Lechertier Barbe, at 95 Jermyn Street, a French company founded in 1827. The store supplied finest brushes, papers and colours still hand-ground by Newman’s, a family firm operating in Soho in 1784. When flush with funds he grandly ordered a gross of bespoke pen nibs from Perry & Co. in St Paul’s Churchyard. Even if shared with Lucian, 144 would have lasted out a very long war. He and Lucian also liked to buy up antique pictures from Lisson Grove saleroom at ten shillings (50p) or so for 50. They wanted the carved and gilded frames, the better if battered. The glass was strewn on the Abercorn Place entrance hall floor, where it gave them a frisson of pleasure for the disconcerting effect on visitors, who had to crack, splinter and smash a path to the stairs as if braving thin ice on a frozen lake. They also delighted in producing new works on old canvases – John once painting over a Landseer. But three Samuel Palmer etchings bought for 7/6d each (37.5p) were Craxton studio treasures. The two young artists stayed regularly at Alderholt Mill House. On 30 December 1942, E.Q. wrote to Ben Nicholson: John Craxton and the friend he now shares a flat with in London – Lucien Freud – were both here for about 3 weeks just before Xmas. It was v. great fun but quite impossible for 3 people to work in one house. Lucien is a painter too. He draws v. beautifully sometimes – I got on with my knitting.2 At Alderholt, Lucian drew Tommy the donkey and a study of John composing an illustrated letter with Kit’s architectural plan chest in the background. The hash made of the Craxton hands confirmed Peter Watson’s view that his protégés needed further training in draughtsmanship (‘You need to know how to draw a hand before you can distort it’). Graham Sutherland recommended the life classes at Goldsmiths College. Peter paid the fares and fees. Under sympathetic principal Clive Gardiner, John progressed with fresh explorations of the tinted paper favoured by Renaissance and Old Master draughtsmen. His key discovery, in a New Cross art supplies shop, was a hoard of pre-war Conté pencils. He bought the lot and at once and forever

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found his preferred drawing medium. Lucian, previously working with a mapping pen, caught the new enthusiasm. As John wrote to David Attenborough 50 years later: Of all the pencils it is for me the most sensuous and versatile. It was in direct revolt against the accepted HB and 2B lead pencils favoured by most art students and teachers at that time to draw models with. They stroked and smudged the outlines producing a sfumato line that gave the eye plenty of options. Both Lucian and I were determined to at least try one line right or wrong. They were taking their cue from Ingres, Seurat and Picasso. But since their shading was done with dots, the two artists were treated to derisive remarks such as ‘How’s the measles?’ As well as student mockery John was now subject to irate knocking on his studio floor from the tenant below. He was appalled to discover that this American man of wrath was the music critic Clinton Gray-Fisk, who, as a piano student rejected by Harold, nursed a grudge against the Craxtons. Even Essie noted that ‘Clinton Gray-Fisk isn’t as white as driven snow’. He had been driven by penury or prurience or both to act as chauffeur to ‘prostitutes’ padre’ Harold Davidson – the defrocked Norfolk rector turned travelling sideshow performer who, as if a modern Christian martyr, was mauled to death by a lion in Skegness. Old Gray-Face was also becoming incensed with Lucian, whose girlfriends and malefactor pals arrived late at night and rang the wrong bell. Possibly it was jealousy. Anyway, he had good grounds for suspecting the Luce living that prompted the artist’s later admission: ‘You couldn’t go out in the blackout without getting the clap.’3 The friends were barely installed in what Lucian described as ‘a most delishiouse flat’ when he further reported: ‘I had to dial 999 this morning in order to ask Scotland Yard to remove a threatining gangster.’4 Even without a ruffian rumpus, Mr Gray-Fisk was disturbed by much crunching over broken glass. Soon John was hated most of all: He was angry that I wouldn’t put a carpet on my floor to mask the noise coming through his ceiling. Also, he objected to my war work … I depicted still-lives with croissants, liking their crescent-moon shapes. But I would arrive each morning to find my models had been eaten by mice. I decided that the answer was to feed the mice so that they wouldn’t go to the trouble of climbing on to the table. This worked very well – so well that news got out and the mice brought in family and friends from the neighbourhood. In the end I was running a British Restaurant for rodents. Wasting food in a time of wartime shortage was shocking enough, but entertaining vermin was consorting with the enemy. For all his charm, John Craxton could be a neighbour from hell.

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Joan by Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1946 Charcoal drawing on paper, c.24 × 16 cm. Private collection

At this point he met a neighbour from heaven – the photographer Joan Eyres Monsell, who lived across the landing from Peter Watson. Six feet tall and willow slender, she had a light golden colouring save for eyes so blue they seemed like ‘two bits of sky, and looking very far away – horizon gazing’.5 Elegant, empathetic and intellectual, Joan was the rebellious daughter of a Tory peer, independent thanks to money from her mother that she shared with her circle. One of a series of older women with whom the young John conducted intense relationships and perhaps fleeting affairs, Joan (ten years his senior) would prove the most loyal friend of his entire life – ultimately helping him to get to Greece, but for now taking him dancing. Estranged from her journalist husband John Rayner, Joan led the painter she and others dubbed Johnny (some preferred Cracky; he himself stuck with John) to chic London nightspots. They danced in Le Boeuf sur le Toit behind the National Gallery in Orange Street, named after the cabaret-bar haunt of avant-garde artists in pre-war Paris. Joan brushed aside the manager’s protests that her guest was wearing sandals. ‘It was a dream’, he said. ‘She was so sexy, so attractive; slightly aloof but the hint of bed.’ Joan and John also went to David Tennant’s Gargoyle Club – a Soho institution since the mid-1920s, ranging over three upper floors and a roof garden at 69 Dean Street, on the corner with Meard Street, whose décor had been designed in part by Henri Matisse. The adventure began in a tiny lift, giving passengers the sensation of a jerky descent into the basement while they were in fact ascending. They arrived at a gleaming steel-and-brass staircase, rising to the clubroom modelled on the Moorish Alhambra palace in Andalusia – a now shabby vision in red set off with a gold-leaf ceiling. Thanks to Matisse, walls were studded with mirrored fragments from an eighteenth-century chateau; there was a fountain on the dance floor, and lanterns in suspended wooden gargoyles. Supper was served until midnight, but the main attraction for many was Alec Alexander’s dance band. John would have preferred jazz. He loved overheard snatches of conversation – as when Graham Greene asked philosopher A.J. Ayer: ‘Can you talk me out of Catholicism?’ He played deaf when gay diplomat (and Soviet spy) Guy Burgess invited him to his flat: ‘Would you like to be whipped, wine thrown in?’ One of two major Matisse paintings hanging in the Gargoyle Club until

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the Blitz, The Red Studio, was now with the Redfern Gallery after Tate trustees rejected it for £400. Peter Watson wanted the picture but it was too large for his Palace Gate flat, so John offered a wall in Abercorn Place. Peter, fearing a fatal impact on the young painter in his workspace, advised the Redfern Gallery to raise the price from £700 to £900, apparently aiming to deter his protégé from somehow finding the money to buy it. Since John was pleased to sell Landscape with Poet and Birdcatcher for £15, there was practically no chance of that. Perhaps Peter’s real purpose was to stop himself from relenting and giving his favourite young artist an amazing present. Amid Peter’s well-meant machinations, one of the twentieth century’s greatest pictures slipped away to New York and the Museum of Modern Art. Matisse drawings of ballet dancers remained in the Gargoyle Club bar, dubbed by David Tennant ‘my unpaid cabaret’. For one night only, John was about to sleep with a modernist masterpiece, courtesy of a man in a modest Sussex flat who had ‘a small but marvellous collection of Picassos’. On 7 April 1942 Peter Watson wrote: ‘Don’t forget that if you want to go to see Hugh Willoughby’s pictures with me we have to go before the curfew descends again on Britain’s south coast – April 15th.’ They duly beat the cordon around Brighton and Hove, to John’s delectation. For Willoughby was a most discerning art collector and dealer; he had lived in France and, by the late 1930s, was thought to own more Picassos than any other Briton – twenty or so pictures – as well as works by Matisse and Derain. Athough some had been removed to the rural home of Sacheverell Sitwell for safer wartime storage, the core in the Hove flat included a coloured drawing for Weeping Woman – greatest of the pendants for Guernica, depicting Picasso’s lover Dora Maar. John studied this study very carefully. Peter was seeking pictures for an Aid to Russia exhibition he was helping to organise in the modernist house of architect Ernö Goldfinger at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead. The June 1942 show, opened by Madame Maisky, wife of the Russian Ambassador, would comprise 68 sculptures, paintings, drawings and prints by many of Europe’s leading avant-garde artists, some on loan from the Watson collection. The roll-call included Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Barbara Hepworth, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, André Masson, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Roland Penrose, John Piper, Kurt Schwitters, Graham Sutherland and Julian Trevelyan. There were also three Craxton drawings (Sawn-up Trees and Trees and Ruins sold, with John receiving half of the 22-guinea proceeds). Plus, Picasso’s magnificent La Niçoise oil portrait of Nusch Éluard, lent by Hugh Willoughby and insured for a colossal £1,500. John went by train to Brighton to collect La Niçoise, and then had the bonus of sleeping with the painting above his bed in Abbey Road Mansions overnight (not that he slept much through that exciting night with a picture whose colours were ‘pinging and twanging like Spanish music’). Lucian was allowed to return it. All did not go smoothly, Hugh Willoughby being forced to make an insurance claim since somehow the frame was damaged in transit. Both John and Lucian were careless enthusiasts. Even so, that November Lucian

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was entrusted by owner Roland Penrose with delivering the Weeping Woman painting from Hampstead to Hove, where it was to be hung alongside its study drawing for an exhibition in the Willoughby flat. Lucian sent John a letter illustrated with a cigar-smoking lounge lizard in an armchair of Brighton’s Norfolk Hotel as a waiter approaches with a tray of drinks: My dear Cragx What a swell lounge for a lounge lizird at the norfolk Hotel Brigton. Wee Giz! Quel Comfortio went to see Willoughby is he mad why hes craad-mazy. Hes arranged to show his collection of Picassos in London the moment the bombs stop … The address at the top of the page revealed that Lucian had pursued Lorna Wishart, the first real love of his life, to her marital home in Sussex. Youngest of seven beautiful, impulsive and implacable Garman sisters, Lorna had gravitated from the Black Country of the West Midlands to bohemia by way of

Letter from Lucian Freud, 1942 Waiter and lounge lizard drawing: ink on paper, 38 × 45.7 cm

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Bloomsbury. One sibling, the bisexual Mary, married roving and raging poet Roy Campbell; another, Kathleen, was the long-term mistress of sculptor Jacob Epstein (holding tight even when shot by Mrs Epstein – the bullet missing her heart but hitting below her left shoulder). Now Lorna was married to the Marxist publisher Ernest Wishart with whom she had two sons; an infant daughter was from her ongoing affair with writer Laurie Lee. Like Lucian, she knew no barriers to her desires and in this unfettered expression of will, wish and whim theirs was a perfect match – of the kind that when lit (by a spark of jealousy) could cause conflagration. John said: Lorna was the most wonderful company, frightfully amusing and ravishingly good-looking: she could turn you to stone with a look … She had a kind of mystery, a mystical inner quality. Any young man would have wanted her.6 Eleven years older than Lucian, Lorna had married ‘Wish’ when she was 16 and had long since tired of his devotion. Soon after the lounge lizard sent John that letter, he and his lover were surprised in bed by her husband – who, while hurt by a lack of tact, remained polite to Lucian. Laurie Lee was less magnanimous when he came across the couple hand in hand in a London street. Speeding to town in her open-topped Bentley, Lorna gave Lucian gifts that he worked into his art: garden quinces (reputed to be Aphrodite’s golden love apple and the forbidden fruit of Eden); a dead heron found in an estuary; a stuffed zebra’s head from a shop in Piccadilly. They gave each other an obsession, while neither was ever quite obsessed enough to dispel other opportunities. Lorna modelled for Lucian, as did her teenage son Michael. The influx of sitters into Abercorn Place included Nigel MacDonald, a future antiques dealer of whom Lucian produced especially sexualised images, and, in a sign of desperation, the aptly named Gerald Wilde. Another protégé of Peter Watson, Gerald fibbed about being related to Oscar and the only survivor of a bomb disposal squad. He dressed in suit and tie while living a vagrant life. For a month he was put up in John’s storeroom. His luggage was chiefly drawings, the best removed by his hosts for an exhibition plotted on his behalf. Gerald tracked down the framer, reclaimed the pictures and sold them in pubs for drinks. Around this time John returned to the family flat to find a note signed by Antony and Robin on his bed. In a Tube carriage while Robin was on leave from the Signals Corps they had seen a young man goading a teenager in a ‘sadistic homosexual’ manner; the assailant had been Lucian Freud. The authors wrote that unless John ended such a sordid association forthwith, they would cease to regard him as a brother. John told his parents and a family conference was called at which Harold said there would be no expulsions from his family while he lived. John then quizzed his would-be non-siblings. What had the

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victim of the train attack looked like? Robin and Antony described a podgy, rosy-cheeked Clement Freud – just as John had expected. He knew how far Lucian could go, in public and in private, to bully his younger sibling. The fact that Lucian had no behavioural boundaries was a big part of his appeal. On New Year’s Eve 1942, John told E.Q.: I expect soon you will get to hear about [Oliver] Brown of Leicester Galleries arriving round at the flat at 9 in the morning, he found Luce opening the door completely nude. Never mind these artists! He picked out an oil & two gouaches for show this Sataday oh dear I will never be ready in time.7 The pictures were for one of the Leicester Galleries’ regular mixed shows featuring established and emerging talents under the title Artists of Fame and Promise. To John and Lucian the exhibitors were known as ‘Artists of Shame and Compromise’ – but John was glad to number among them. All the more so when he was singled out by the New Statesman critic Raymond Mortimer and made a first sale to a stranger (architect Ian Phillips). Oliver Brown returned to select works by both artists for the New Year exhibition of 1943. John’s drawing of a solitary figure in Landscape with Rocks was reproduced in The Listener, whose critic, R.H. Wilenski, commented: ‘Craxton gives us formal inventions conducive to some mood.’ Attention like that was conducive to some celebration. Even Lucian was impressed.

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EXQUISITE CORPSES

Tim Craxton had been stationed at RAF Duxford near Cambridge where his girlfriend of the hour, Joan Bayon, lived locally with her family at Little Shelford. Tim had introduced her to the approving Craxtons with every temporary intention of marriage. Her canny parents, Peter and Nelia, who liked Tim but saw long-term limitations, said they would consent to the wedding if he could save £100. The suitor lost the challenge after introducing Joan to his pilot friend Bill Smith. They fell for one another and Bill sold a sports car to meet the Bayon bargain. As Mrs Smith, and the mother of two small children, Joan remained a friend to all the Craxtons, and John in particular. From 1943 John took Lucian to Little Shelford to stay with the Bayons at King’s Farm – a rambling house with a seventeenth-century core once owned by King’s College, Cambridge. Outside there was a dovecote with a secret passage to the church, two Jersey cows and a field for horses beyond gardens rife with chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks and pigeons. The resident family and their dogs completed a spell of enchantment. High spirits had free rein; at mealtimes adults, children and canines cantered in the garden between main course and pudding. The Bayons stood out in a dour and insular rural neighbourhood riven by wartime suspicion. Of Swiss descent, Peter was an animal pathologist who spoke 14 languages in a foreign accent. That was enough for him to be reported as a spy – final proof being the red ribbon Joan and her sister put in a crab apple tree, surely as a signal to the Nazis. The suspect scientist specialised in chicken diseases, and corpses of fowls and other creatures were sent to him for dissection. If his autopsy revealed death from natural causes, the object of interest would be roasted for a family lunch – until John and Lucian came to stay. They had a new passion for stillest-life studies and a supply of dead animals was just what they wanted. Pheasants meant for the Alderholt Mill kitchen were also intercepted. Lucian worked so meticulously, stressing every scale, nail and feather, that the model was liable to putrefy before depiction. The energetic Joan Bayon fled from Lucian’s entreaties to paint her portrait – fearing death by boredom.

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Goose, 1943 Ink and gouache on paper, 47 × 64 cm. British Museum

Both John and Lucian splashed paint and ink on bedsheets, and Lucian set fire to his bed after falling asleep while smoking. Warned that a wild horse named Alice could not be ridden, Lucian took up the challenge: since the task was going to be so easy, he would ride her bareback and backwards. Alice reversed under a washing line, throwing an angry Freud on to the grass. He was irate when paintings he gave to Joan were stored in a stable and ruined when the roof fell in. For Joan’s children, Ranald and Francis, John and Lucian were objects of outlandish interest. The visitors talked a private language known as eggy-peggy, so Ranald and a cousin invented a nonsense tongue of their own called boggledoze: We were very small and they were all terribly bright. Talk and laughter flowed. There seemed to be no silences. One morning we were having breakfast and the windows were open. A bantam flew in. John had a lot of cream in his porridge from our Jersey cows. She walked the length of the table and stepped into John’s porridge – warming her feet. Very carefully he continued to eat around the bird, rotating his plate until she was standing on a little porridge island. Then he returned the bowl with the bantam still in it to the serving hatch to the kitchen.1 Joan Bayon had a moment in the spotlight in May 1945, when Noël Coward’s ghostly stage comedy Blithe Spirit, set in a country house, was released as a

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David Lean film. She painted decorations for the opening titles. Her fairytale pictures feature a castle on a mountain unknown to flat Cambridgeshire, with a cast of creatures including unicorn and dragon never native to the fenlands. But the blithe spirit conjured up in Joan’s paintings is that of King’s Farm – a citadel against a world of conflict, an Ark in a flood. While war raged around them, a wall inscription in the entrance hall read ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ – the title of two Nicolas Poussin paintings depicting classical shepherds grouped around a tomb. And in Arcadia I am: death in the midst of life. For the hedonist John Craxton it would always be the other way round. In the midst of death there was life – and, however fleeting, pleasures were to be fully savoured and painted. In Cambridge, John was directed by Peter Watson to the transcendent Wren Library of Trinity College, but his most significant discovery occurred in a second-hand bookshop. Here he bought seventeenth-century emblem books, with engravings derived from medieval allegories and bestiaries, that fed his art. He also caught the eerie atmosphere of local fen landscapes, where bent and pollarded willows lined rivers and drainage dykes. The trees with lopped limbs could be construed as truncated monsters, and the artist further imagined their hollow interiors as hiding places for lost boys – like the rocky caves with sheltering shepherds also depicted in this period. ‘I was influenced by Surrealism’, he said, ‘which let in a sense of paranoia and allowed for metamorphosis.’ Craxton trees could look like old people, but back in London he got into trouble for portraying old people as trees. The elderly men were in a civil defence unit patrolling the area below Regent’s Park. They were drawn snoring during breaks in the Royal Academy of Music basement, with resentment when they awoke and found they had been recast as wizened lumps of wood when their guard was down. John also quipped to his commanding officer that, while he would defend the Regency terraces of Regent’s Park to the death, the Luftwaffe was welcome to bad inter-war buildings in Baker Street. He was lucky not to be arrested rather than dismissed. Although his work was too personal for any official war art propagandist purpose, Kenneth Clark and the Horizon grandees were always ready to plead his cause as a painter of exceptional gifts. He continued to require protection from his own droll sense of humour. Even in the depths of constraint, he was an innocent abroad. Now his work was claiming serious attention and he was still only 20. Two 1943 commissions began a six-decade career as a book decorator – he objected to the word ‘illustrator’ since the link between words and pictures was at best oblique. John Craxton would never be an artist with a prosaic message. A fine jacket for (Charles) Wrey Gardiner’s poetic memoir The Once Loved God showed a fallen moon-face held in a tree’s embrace. The title referred to the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus, now boarded up but still the hub of a homosexual cruising ground. Indeed, the area had hotted up with ebbing and flowing tides of horny servicemen on leave. One of John’s

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Jacket for The Once Loved God by (Charles) Wrey Gardiner, 1943

uniformed pick-ups, for an afternoon in the Pastoria Hotel off Leicester Square, was the future Soho and Vogue magazine photographer John Deakin. The moon had become a more potent romantic symbol since the obliteration of artificial light during the blackout lent the starry night sky an unaccustomed visibility. The animated Walt Disney movie Pinocchio, seen by John in a packed cinema in an early stage of the Blitz, popularised the song ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’. Most pre-war Londoners could not see to think such a thing. Now Geoffrey Grigson walked in the evening across Russell Square and exulted in a London moon, a crescent in a green sky seen for the first time. The Grigson green revealed that the peril of pollution still hovered among protective barrage balloons over the capital. The second Craxton decoration of 1943 was for Ruthven Todd’s fantasy novel The Lost Traveller (published early in 1944), whose central character was transformed into a bird. A cover and frontispiece design showed a fresh variant on the solitary sleepers who resemble Endymion – the shepherd of Greek mythology, cast into youth-preserving sleep for his moon-goddess lover, Selene – while also being projections of the artist’s wartime self. John was literally a lost traveller, held against his will on a blockaded island. He signalled a shift in allegiances by exchanging his image for a 1935 Miró pochoir, Woman and Dog in Front of the Moon. The Todd story, like the Gardiner memoir, was also an exercise in literary Surrealism playing to the dislocated and disquieting air of the Craxton pictures: Lucian and I never wanted to be involved in group art or needed a readymade style to conform to. But we both cast a shrewd eye on Surrealism if it suited us – the juxtaposition of strange objects that disturb one by their ambiguity. Being a Surrealist didn’t make you a good painter and the trouble was that an awful number of second-rate painters became good Surrealists. Ruthven Todd recalled going about with John and Lucian as ‘a crazy experience’. He took them to Tilty Mill House, near Dunmow, which he was beautifying with choice furniture, books and pictures. They were a surreal

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Frontispiece for The Lost Traveller by Ruthven Todd, 1943

sight in rural Essex: ‘Lucian was wearing a most peculiar cap and he explained, in my local pub, that he had taken it off the head of a drowned Dutch sailor he had found on a lonely beach.’ 2 The two friends were now mixing in a Surrealist milieu, having been introduced to the Belgian painter and art dealer E.L.T. Mesens by critic Robert Melville. This singular eccentric and close ally of René Magritte hosted weekly Surrealist dinners in Soho’s Barcelona restaurant, where John and Lucian met Roland Penrose and photographer Lee Miller, painters Eileen Agar and Conroy Maddox, and Jacques Brunius, assistant director to Luis Buñuel on the film L’âge d’or. These and Horizon parties were highlights amid a social and cultural blackout. From 1943 there were also dinners at Upper Terrace House in Hampstead hosted by Jane and Kenneth Clark – amid grand company and glorious pictures, gifted young artists were always welcome. Edouard Mesens was talent-spotting John and Lucian for the time when he could reopen his avant-garde London Gallery. A peculiar Craxton 1942 oil showing a stuffed bison head in a church vestry, preceding the Freud motif of a zebra’s head, could well have appealed as the art of ambiguity. Meanwhile, Oliver Brown was accepting less challenging Craxton pictures for mixed shows at the Leicester Galleries – hence the encounter with the nude Lucian in Abercorn Place. When the Clarks announced a Sunday teatime visit to see the latest Craxton work, a plot was laid to include Freud pictures too. Arriving in tweeds as if for a grouse shoot, the Clarks praised John’s English Delft plates bearing Lucie Freud’s apple strudel. John then asked Kenneth if he knew Hans Calmann, Lucian’s Old Master dealer uncle. He said he did but was xenophobic against ‘Middle Europeans’. Lucian had been listening at the door and John heard a retreat upstairs. So he blurted that his artist friend was living there and a second studio call was readily agreed. For once Lucian had taken care not to unnerve his visitors. He obtained animal corpses from a Camden Town pet shop and his current model – a rotting monkey – was hidden out of sight and smell in the kitchen oven. The tour went well, though John and Lucian collapsed in hysterics on parting from a transported National Gallery director who, back in the street, and back to earth with a bump, pointed at a block of luxury flats and declared: ‘Strange lives.’ The strangeness was all in No. 14.

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Kenneth Clark had bought his first picture, when a schoolboy, from the Leicester Galleries, and grew close to Oliver Brown through shared passion for art and fondness for artists. Oliver had joined his father and the Phillips brothers in 1903 in a building off Leicester Square whose façade had a touch of Venetian Gothic and whose record in presenting modern art was now unrivalled. The gallery had hosted first solo displays in Britain for Cézanne, Van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, Klee and many more. In an era when museums did not hold special exhibitions, a programme of monthly shows, often by single artists, was a novelty; catalogue notes by George Bernard Shaw, Anatole France and Ezra Pound were themselves works of art. According to John Craxton an entrance fee and turnstile ‘kept out touting tarts’. Oliver Brown was now steering a steady wartime course, with impressive shows by Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland. Most galleries closed down for the duration, but the Leicester sailed on – even after a bomb in October 1940 blew out the main window. The shop front was then covered in drop scenes painted by John Piper and others. This satisfied blackout rules but left the mild-mannered Mr Brown saddened that he could no longer peep out through the curtains to enjoy the horrified faces of passers-by at the latest modern art monstrosity. In early days Oliver Brown had bought watercolours from a shabbily dressed caller at the gallery: the elderly son of Samuel Palmer selling off his artistic inheritance. How dearly John Craxton would have loved his choice of the spoils. He was forever an ardent collector, who relied on visual and mental cleverness since he was usually short of cash. He hunted in junk shops, street markets and salerooms – buying and selling antique china to augment limited funds; spying a fifteenth-century Burgundian carving of St Anne in Lisson Grove during the Blitz and bagging it for 6/6d (32.5p). He picked up for five shillings (25p), from a stall in Church Street, Marylebone, what was believed to be a third-century Roman head of Janus. This marble evocation of youth and age became a model for John and Lucian. It featured in the Freud painting Still Life with Chelsea Buns, while the more abstracted and mask-like Craxton version was later bought by the singer Peter Pears and hung in the houses he shared with composer Benjamin Britten. John hunted for prints with Ruthven Todd, especially in refugee Ernest Seligmann’s bookshop in Cecil Court off Charing Cross Road. Given the proprietor’s kindness, as well as his expertise, John bought works by Marcantonio Raimondi, master engraver of the Italian Renaissance, very cheaply. A sale of his 1942 painting Old Man in the Rocks, for 15 guineas to Lucian’s lover Lorna Wishart, allowed him to obtain – from a second-hand bookshop in Marylebone High Street – one of the most exciting finds of his life. Turning over a picture with its dirty face to the wall, he recognised an ‘exquisitely painted’ work of William Blake:

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Satan Exulting over Eve by William Blake, c.1795 Colour print, ink and watercolour on paper laid on canvas, 43 × 53.5 cm. Tate

When I had cleaned it with my clean handkerchief it looked so lovely – there was Satan hovering over a prone figure of Eve apple in one hand & the serpent twisting round her with its scaley head on her breast.3 He could scarcely believe that such a treasure as Satan Exulting over Eve could really be his after what was effectively a swap for one of his own pictures. The gem had already been spotted by Ruthven Todd but he was too broke to buy it. All he could afford were a few ‘enthralling’ Craxton drawings at prices barely covering the cost of materials. John was later saddened to find these virtual gifts sold on, before he discovered that Tilty Mill House had been robbed and wrecked when sub-let to the two Roberts. In the meantime he was further heartened by a friend taking 11 of his drawings and paintings to New York to show Jimmy Ernst – son of Max and now director of Peggy Guggenheim’s The Art of this Century gallery, newly launched with a bold Surrealist emphasis. E.Q. was told that ‘he liked them and wanted more’ before the moment passed, along with the Craxton brush with Surrealism. Ill-health was also being turned to good effect. A doctor calling at Abbey Road Mansions to treat the artist for jaundice knew the manager of a nowshut London paint factory – not just any old paint but the Ripolin household enamel paint used by Picasso. An appointment was made in a Drury Lane office, where John helped himself to out-of-date sample tins: I went off with bags and bags of tins and then Lucian got in on the act too. The idea is that you put on masses of undercoat and then Ripolin on top which doesn’t discolour. We mixed tube colours with the Ripolin and they have retained a luminosity where other paintings of that period have not. In thrall to the new medium, John painted over several watercolours – one being the seminal Alderholt Mill, where a ground of rich olive greens gives way to a bold geometric structure of white, red and black beneath an Aegean sky.

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Alderholt Mill, 1943–4 Oil on board, 48.5 × 61 cm. John Craxton Estate

The picture lit up in the darkness of Craxton wartime work like a flare, signalling future intent. What began as an impression of Dorset became a long-distance love letter to Greece. Another bright image shows Alderholt Mill below a sky with what seem to be cirrus clouds forming the outline of a white bird of paradise, but are in fact the contrails of two aeroplanes probably engaged in a dogfight. This is the nearest the artist came to an overt depiction of the war. The Ripolin effect was a blast against grey England. John loved the paint for allowing ‘the statement without the brush-strokes’, in contrast to the prevailing fashion of William Coldstream and the Euston Road School. Seeing the movement of naturalism, realism and social relevance as the official school of English painting, he deplored its ‘academic brushwork, dingy colour and dull illusionism of tonality’. Exploding in a letter to E.Q., he berated the group as timid & Weak & ineffectual for being the essence of English boredom for … failing to notice Michelangelo Picasso Blake El Greco Lucas Cranach Christopher Wood oh Christ for being so appallingly small minded, so rotten, so decadent, so worthless.4

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WELSH ARCADIA

In September 1943 Peter Watson thought that John needed a holiday and a change of painterly scene. He himself grabbed any excuse to leave London, where he felt at his most depressed. John was thrilled when it was agreed that he and Peter should join Graham and Kathleen Sutherland in Pembrokeshire. After a long journey, they arrived at dusk at Lleithyr Farm, below the Carn Llidi and Carn Lleithyr hills, within an easy walk of Whitesands Bay and a mile from the tiny cathedral city of St Davids. It felt like a foreign country, and not only because their hosts, the James family, spoke Welsh. Mrs James had just rewhitened crosses and curlicues on corners of the farmhouse to ward off witches. John sensed a much older stratagem for keeping evil spirits away. Next morning he started to explore a landscape known only from Sutherland paintings: isolated white farms among dark trees; streams pouring through wild flowers and sunken lanes through hedges; the harvest reaching to cliff edges and promontories of thrift and heather; buzzards overhead rather than aeroplanes. The painter was struck by a network of small circular fields, many with a standing stone used as a scratching post for cattle. John believed these menhir monoliths to be ancient phallic symbols invoking the spirits to propagate crops, and they were to loom as mysterious presences in his Welsh pictures. In a place of peace and plenty, John and Peter felt freed from the war. Lleithyr Farm still served the traditional Welsh fried breakfast: laverbread – fritters of boiled seaweed rolled in oatmeal – cockles and thick, home-cured bacon. There were seemingly unlimited supplies of eggs, milk, honey, and home-made butter and bread. Rationing was a distant rumour – far further off than the barrage balloons suspended over the little port of Milford Haven like tiny toys. Mushrooms were being gathered in the fields and woods, and the figure of a farm worker holding an edible, or perhaps poisonous, fungal growth became a motif in the visitor’s ensuing pictures. Mushroom growing was a popular activity on the Home Front, but John Craxton was drawn to the symbolism of a living thing forming in the dark. The dampness of hastily constructed and poorly ventilated air-raid shelters in millions of British back gardens or basements encouraged mould and mildew and prompted many civilians, and not only the rheumatic and arthritic, to remain in their beds when sirens sounded.

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Peter took John to visit Sir John Philipps. King of the Welsh castles, he lived in Picton Castle and owned two more. But the best part of this captivating first visit was Graham Sutherland being on hand to act as a guide over, and beyond, local topography. The point was to look further and deeper than the literal to reach the heart and soul – with intense feeling altering the appearance of things. ‘Would you say that paintings were made of two facets, flesh and bones?’ John asked. ‘No’, replied Graham. ‘Flesh and spirit.’1 The two artists set off together on sketching expeditions each morning, then parted – John going armed with his tutor’s advice to paraphrase a scene. He adopted the Sutherland working method of using a sketchbook to make linear notes for paintings likely to be produced far from their inspirational subjects, and then tried a more direct exercise in emulation. Seeking the source of Sutherland’s Entrance to a Lane, he was guided towards the estuary along a path from the road to Sandy Haven and left there. Numerous drawings ensued to ensure a disciple’s exactitude when he came to produce his own version of the picture. But the Sutherland green tunnel into light could not be truthfully replicated, since overhanging brambly vegetation in the original image had never existed. That was a vital lesson for an imaginative artist – as was Sutherland’s candid admission that one of his most admired compositions ‘nearly didn’t come off’. Both the setting and vision of the man John rated as Britain’s best living painter produced a sense of bared idyll: The land was reduced to basic elements of life: rocks, fig trees, gorse, the nearness of sea on all sides, a brilliantly clear light. Everything was stripped away – all the verbiage, that is – to the essential sources of existence.2 He was content until a walk on St David’s Head when Peter Watson remarked that, for all the clarity and pared-down beauty, this stark stretch of coastal southwest Wales was still a pale imitation of Greece. That was it. John became more determined than ever: when the long war finally ended, he would somehow reach the real thing. The widely travelled Peter continued to prod and provoke such yearning – turning the word Mediterranean into a term of high praise for a painting, as in ‘It has a lovely light; it’s very Mediterranean’. Now the art was rapidly advancing. The influences of Palmer and Blake were eclipsed by those of Sutherland, Miró and Picasso, and information from the natural world was being transformed by greater distillation. A dislodged tree root on the estuary at Sandy Haven spurred a series of drawings and paintings, leading to the largest and most complex Craxton composition to date: Welsh Estuary Foreshore. This fresh statement evolved from salvaged material. John had got to know the Surrealist artist Julian

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Welsh Estuary Foreshore, 1943 Oil on burlap, 112.5 × 180.5 cm. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Trevelyan and was now invited to Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race parties at Julian’s Thames-side studio home in Hammersmith Terrace. On another visit he was shocked to find antique frames suspended from a window and waiting for the tidal river to remove gilt and gesso. His amused host retrieved the still-golden relics, wrapped them in burlap sacking and gave them as a gift. The wrapper proved the greater present, for Miró in his youthful poverty had shown how effectively such coarse fabric could be used instead of conventional canvas. Working with black and white, and the sand colour of burlap, John created an extraordinary foreshore assembly of rocks, plants and tree root – plus a mutant creature on the tideline. He already admired André Masson’s metamorphic paintings of animal and human forms. Now, almost lost in abstraction, the flotsam figure refers to Picasso’s Weeping Woman painting of Dora Maar seen in the Hampstead house of his new friend Roland Penrose, artist and avant-garde champion (as well as the sketch in Hugh Willoughby’s Hove flat). By some peculiar process of metamorphosis, Dora is turning into a cuttlefish recalled from Selsey holidays, by way of a mythical sea monster known as a kraken. And kraken – in a Peter Watson joke – is a pun on Craxton. Back in London John was invited to visit the Sutherlands in their converted oasthouse in the Kent village of Trottiscliffe. ‘Do bring Lucian’, Graham said. ‘We so want to meet him.’ The two friends put their bicycles on the train and cycled from Wrotham station, asking directions in a landscape

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with all the road signs removed. After a tour of Graham’s studio, Kathy cooked a quiche lunch and they all walked to the Coldrum Stones Neolithic long barrow. John and Lucian had no idea that pretty much bedridden in nearby Tonbridge lay the doomed epitome of Neo-Romantic art, Denton Welch. This painter-writer shared their burning energy though eight years into the debilitating and ultimately deadly impact of a bicycling accident. At the time of his catastrophe he had been a Goldsmiths art student working on a painting of a Corinthian capital surrounded by London weeds. Moving from hospital to nursing home, he wrote: ‘Now we were passing Trottiscliffe where I often stayed as a child. I strained across the fields to see the white cowls of the converted oasthouse. I imagined I caught a glimpse of them twinkling back at me.’3 It was as if the oasthouse transmitted a message of artistic success and solidarity but not to Denton Welch. Graham Sutherland, although befriending the isolated invalid by this stage, had another introduction in mind for his two visitors. ‘I want you to meet this fantastic painter, Francis Bacon’, he said. ‘He’s a cross between Vuillard and Picasso.’ Soon seeing the art, John missed the artist until after the war. By August 1944 the Sutherlands felt so warmly towards John and Lucian that they followed them to Pembrokeshire, where the two friends were staying at the Mariner’s Arms in Haverfordwest. The anarchic high spirits of the young men proved less congenial in close and sustained proximity, so Graham and Kathy moved to a cottage at Sandy Haven. Shared sketching trips continued. Having drawn Boat in an Estuary, John added a pastel image Boot in an Estuary. The once-sturdy piece of footwear lost to the sea is a metaphor for war, but the artist also enjoyed a punning title. Graham was working on studies for his Horned Forms painting, inspired by a beached tree stump. If not the same stump that John had worked from since the previous summer, there was still a firm suggestion that a mentor can learn from a pupil. John asked Graham why he never painted a blue sky and was told that such rendition would be too literal. However, the Sutherland thorn tree images begun in Pembrokeshire the following year had sky-blue backdrops. John longed to buy the best but a £50 price was beyond him. So another prized picture entered Kenneth Clark’s collection. John and Lucian hired a pony and trap to take the Sutherlands to meet Sir John Philipps – a great service as Graham would have many dealings with the Philipps family in later years, and for a time Picton Castle held a Sutherland museum. But now the castle was requisitioned as an army hospital; eccentric, engaging and gay Johnny Philipps had to make do with a few first-floor rooms. His ancestral home remained a romantic vision in medieval masonry, with exotic fruits and flowers in Victorian glasshouses and sheep-grazed grass beyond. John and the baronet also met in London until, in 1948, Johnny Philipps died in a hot bath after taking a sleeping pill in his Piccadilly flat.

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Welsh Landscape with Sleeping Reaper, 1944–5 Conté pencil and gouache on paper, 27.5 × 37 cm. Private collection

In Craxton images of the wild outdoors based on a Welsh Arcadia, the bronzed farm labourer holding a scythe, hoe or mushroom now takes on an authentic Mediterranean air – for the fieldworkers of Pembrokeshire were often Italian prisoners-of-war, marked out by crimson disks sewn on their shirt-backs. Swarthily handsome and very friendly, they laughed, joked and sang as they laboured far from their native vineyards and olive groves. At some point John saw a ferocious guard dog or heard the legend of a demonic hound. It was then embroidered into his Welsh pictures as a wolf-like beast of the night howling at the moon. This nocturnal savager of sheep – a visual metaphor for war – might be contrasted with a reaper or sleeper in an idyll on the opposite side of the composition. The human model for freedom was probably a prisoner.

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THE POET’S EYE

In June 1943 John received a postcard inviting him to tea with the Australianborn poet and critic W.J. Turner, an uncle of the Craxtons’ lodger Noel MewtonWood and a force of nature. The sender of the card, Sheila Shannon, was doing her able best to harness artistic electricity from a whirlwind. Walter James Turner was also a musicologist, novelist, dramatist, biographer and, when John met him, literary editor of the Spectator and general editor of the Britain in Pictures books. His poems were praised by W.B. Yeats, but his friends could turn to foes – the writer Siegfried Sassoon preferred to think that they had never actually met. Lack of musical training did nothing to temper what a fellow critic called his ‘racy dogma’ in print. He and John hit it off at once through their wicked wit. John relished sweeping Turner verdicts such as ‘German composers go down deeper but come up muddier’. Now Sheila and Walter, as well as having a passionate affair, were editing a bravura venture in illustrated verse anthologies for Walter Neurath and the book packager Adprint. To be published by Frederick Muller as New Excursions into English Poetry, each volume would be decorated by a different artist. John Craxton was among the first to be enlisted. Seven volumes, printed by W.S. Cowell between 1944 and 1947, also involved Michael Ayrton, Edward Bawden, Robert Colquhoun, Mona Moore, John Piper and William Scott. In a strong field the Craxton work, on what was originally to be titled either ‘Objects of Vision’ or ‘Moments of Inspiration’ but became Visionary Poems and Passages or The Poet’s Eye, is the strongest. All depended on the diplomatic diligence of Sheila Shannon (soon to marry the poet and translator from Ancient Greek, Patric Dickinson, after Turner’s sudden death). Plots were hatched in Kardomah café meetings – with text selector Geoffrey Grigson a late arrival at the party. A Cornish vicar’s son, Grigson was another one-man maelstrom. He was the youngest of seven brothers: three had been killed in the First World War, three more would perish as a result of the Second World War. His first wife had died from tuberculosis; his next marriage – to an au pair he met in Hampstead Tube station and rescued from Austria during the Munich Crisis – was now disintegrating. Bitter personal experience further soured his trenchant criticism: he could veer from exultation to excoriation within a single elegant sentence. He had championed the W.H. Auden generation

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in his New Verse, the most influential and combative poetry magazine of the 1930s, ending when he published his own first volume of poems on the day war was declared. Geoffrey passed on a big sheaf of possible texts from which John chose the ones he liked. They discussed a shared love of William Blake, and still more of Samuel Palmer – so that John’s help was noted in the Grigson biography of 1947. In the meantime, words by both Blake and Palmer appeared in The Poet’s Eye (whose leading contributor was Dorset poet William Barnes). John insisted, however, that no design should be a direct illustration. As he wrote to E.Q. from Little Shelford on 10 April 1944: There are to be numerous black & white ‘vignettes’ & 16 5”–8” lithographs in 4 colours how it will all end god knows I am collecting data like mad … my bias is on the inspired moment with a Pastoral leaning … I have been drawing dead birds and rabbits but I really want to go on holiday to Sicily. The willow trees are nice & amazing here but I would prefer an olive tree growing out of a Greek ruin…1 The previous July Michael Tippett, already acclaimed as a composer, had experienced a similar vision – writing: ‘I dreamed of a green flowering olive tree in spring last night. Good.’2 He was serving a jail term at the time for pacifism, after refusing the Non-Combatant Corps alternative to military service. Corps members, comprising conscientious objectors and those failing army medicals, were compelled to work in bomb disposal, transport, agriculture or forestry. John Craxton had big allies but a smaller reputation, and a lucky escape from gruelling physical labour. Kenneth Clark was unable to persuade the War Artists Advisory Committee to buy his work, or to find him a job painting camouflage; but he was left to his own unmobilised ways. Fickle Greek gods continued to smile on him. John had been attending concerts arranged by Michael Tippett for London’s Morley College, and now the composer asked him to provide a cover design for a double motet, Plebs Angelica, to be published on 26 May and premiered in Canterbury Cathedral in September. John produced a sinuous border of trailing ivy linked to several vignettes in The Poet’s Eye (see title page). Appreciating the work of both Tippett and Britten, he was struck by their contrasting natures:

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Graham Sutherland’s favourite lithograph from The Poet’s Eye

Michael was charming, a warm, interested, open character, while Britten was tight and difficult. I got on all right with him but it was like talking to an oyster. One longed for him to sit back and roar with laughter – I wonder if he ever did? 3 After returning to the Central Schools to make a trial lithograph, of a tree growing out of a rock, he set to work on design ideas. Initial proofs were sent to Graham Sutherland, who responded with great enthusiasm: … most of them are really terrific. I like best perhaps the one of the estuary with rocks to L.H. [Little Haven, on St Bride’s Bay, Pembrokeshire] foreground. This is enormously good I think, & you have found a series of outlined symbols which so exactly paraphrase reality. The colour is lovely & it is technically fascinating. Quite superb.4 When required to work in Cowell’s Suffolk printshop, John stayed in the Stour Valley with Ida Affleck Graves – who a decade earlier had celebrated her sexual union with wood engraver Blair Hughes-Stanton in Epithalamion, a fine-press book complete with her partner’s erotic prints. Poor Blair had just had a terrible war, being captured in Greece and shot in the throat and head in a camp in Corinth. Repatriated to Britain, he was keeping a convalescent distance from Ida. Always in search of a party, John bicycled to a nearby aerodrome where one of Tim’s friends was based – but the airman was absent. He fell gladly into the merry company of American aviators, who steered him, early the next morning, to an empty billet:

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At 7am the missing pilot returned from London, opened the door and found me in his bed. He was so sweet about it – putting me on the back of his Harley-Davidson motorbike and taking me off for breakfast. He sat me down for cornflakes while he smoked a cigar. Cycling to Ipswich Buttermarket – where W.S. Cowell had begun in 1818 and was now a state-of-the-art printer and wine merchant – he paused at the post office to send telegrams to Sheila Shannon: ‘COULD YOU MANAGE TWO QUID HAVE TO STAY ON INTO NEXT WEEK; COULD YOU PLEASE WIRE THREE POUNDS TO GPO IPSWICH DOUGHLESS; OH SHEILA THANKS MILLION AM SAVED.’ Fortunately, of all the anthologists and artists she had enlisted for New Excursions into English Poetry, Sheila loved John best. He loved her too, presenting her with the sketchbook and scrapbook for his evolving work compiled in an estate accounts book from 1810. By mid-April he was back in Pembrokeshire – taking a cottage at Maenclochog in the Preseli Hills to produce more preliminary drawings and ink an incoming flow of plates. Sheila funded the trip and sent on weekly postal orders. A plan to stay in the grand John Adam-designed house of writer Leo Walmsley, a friend of Harold and Essie, failed because a departing wife had taken all the furniture. Absorbed in his creative task, the artist now lost all sense of time until summoned to Ipswich by a note of exasperation: Dear Craxton, Please come down on Monday as early as possible in order to complete the work on the plates for the publication ‘Objects of Vision’, which are urgently wanted. The work is being held up and so are the printing machines. Yours faithfully, for W.S. Cowell Ltd. Geoffrey Smith, DIRECTOR. Even when installed with the printers, he continued to cause havoc by ignoring guidelines and deadlines and working up to the last minute on many more pictures than were needed. Innovatory images were finally perfected. They were drawn from imaginary shepherds (one hiding in a hollow tree, another with his face reflected in the moon), metamorphic fenland willows, Welsh scenes (the estuary at Sandy Haven with and without tree roots, St David’s Head landscapes, Haverfordwest Castle) and the river at Fordingbridge near Alderholt. The opening lithograph of a boy in a wood derived from a 1943 chalk study on the back of Lucian’s drawing Man with a Horse on his Head. Green, blue or yellow plates were overprinted in opaque white for a chiaroscuro effect inspired by sixteenth-century Italian

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Cover of Visionary Poems and Passages or The Poet’s Eye

woodcuts owned by the artist. For the cover design – where most of the book title was abandoned, along with the apostrophe – John presented an outsized eye in a beached cuttlefish. This was repeated on the dust jacket and then reimagined again in an ink-drawn text divider. In the only direct link between image and text, the drawing preceded a note by Alfred Lord Tennyson: I found a strange fish on the shore with rainbows about its wild staring eyes, enclosed in a sort of sack with long tentacula beautifully coloured, quite dead, but when I took it up by the tail it spotted all the sand underneath with great drops of black ink, so I suppose it was a kind of cuttlefish. The black ink was the point: an artist could draw with it, a poet could pen a poem with it. Moreover, the chameleon-like cuttlefish – mimicking floating vegetation or seafloor stones – shoots out jets of black ink when threatened, as a decoy or smokescreen. The mysterious marine creature was a symbol for the blackout. While broadly homophobic, Geoffrey Grigson included a bittersweet W.H. Auden ballad of homosexual love in a witty private dedication to his

Two figures in a thorny landscape drawing from The Poet’s Eye

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collaborator. The editor titled the poem ‘Johnny’, although the author did not. The artist responded with a pen and ink vignette depicting two enigmatic figures in a thorny landscape for a poem ending: O last night I dreamed of you, Johnny, my lover, You’d the sun on one arm and the moon on the other, The sea it was blue and the grass it was green, Every star rattled a round tambourine; Ten thousand miles deep in a pit there I lay: But you frowned like thunder and you went away. The lines reflected a lonely yearning in the Craxton art of this conflicted era. The heartsickness of a romantic artist was essentially a longing for escape to the Mediterranean and all the adventures that would bring. There was also a homoerotic element in the hero-worshipping of Graham Sutherland, whose spirit hovers over The Poet’s Eye. The hero relished this frisson. On one occasion Graham wrote: I think your suit as you walk by the Orwell at Pin Mill most becoming. Pockets bulging a bit perhaps, but the trousers most becomingly narrow: really very chic & who wd guess a utility garment? A good travelling collar of stiff white is such a foil for caressing locks which curl over it. Let us meet soon. I hope to be not quite so busy.5

Poet and Moon lithograph from The Poet’s Eye

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New Excursions into English Poetry caught the mood of the moment, with the first volumes in kitbags for Allied advances across Europe and the Far East. It also appealed to the shell-shocked – drug-befuddled David Gascoyne annotating his copy while in West Middlesex Hospital in January 1945. Looking back in 2013, David Attenborough wrote: In 1944, in the middle of the austerities that were gripping embattled Britain, a series of really remarkable poetic anthologies began to appear in bookshops. They were illustrated in a startlingly new way, with full-page coloured plates that were quite unlike any of which I was aware. Printed in a limited number of poster-like colours, they nonetheless conveyed even the tiniest detail of texture in a way that gave them great immediacy. You could almost feel the impress of the artist’s pencil… Craxton’s drawings captivated me … In several, a young dreamer appears, trapped in a landscape that is spiky, hostile and savage … In the spaces between the poems, Craxton added little pen-and-ink-drawings. He called them embellishments. Several of these convey the same hostility of the full pages. But just one or two are gentler. There are glimpses of distant paradisal mountains and plants that look almost tropical. Craxton seems to be dreaming of a time when he could escape from the austerities of a war-torn prison to a more relaxed land.6 Visiting John in Ipswich, Lucian had been given a plate to work on. Now he drew decorations for The Glass Tower by Nicholas Moore, poet son of the philosopher G.E. Moore, in a Poetry London volume funded by Peter Watson. As with The Poet’s Eye, any link between words and pictures is loose at best. Lucian’s arresting images of dead and fantastical animals display an inventiveness all his own, and a new assurance of line owing a lot to John Craxton.

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In spring 1944 Peter Watson rented Tickerage Mill in Sussex, where he and his friends had enjoyed weekend parties thrown by the bohemian photographer and writer Dick Wyndham. Furnishings were too cluttered and antiquated for the Watson taste, so he put them in store and redecorated in his own line of refined modernism, complete with his precious pictures. John made drawings of all the rooms to be emptied, so that they could be reconstructed when a year’s lease ended. In the haven near Uckfield known as ‘Tick Tock’ he also drew a loving portrait of Peter (see p. 59) – capturing his sensuality and vulnerability. Everything was on the move that spring. All over southern England armed forces were rehearsing an invasion of continental Europe. John Craxton was preparing his first significant solo exhibition – for the Leicester Galleries in May. And in Abercorn Place he and Lucian had finally baited Clinton Gray-Fisk beyond endurance: the campaigner against blood sports, with a private interest in the occult, was now forcing their eviction. While still the best of friends, the two painters headed in different directions – Lucian taking over a Delamere Terrace flat, facing the Grand Union Canal in run-down Paddington. On 27 April John and Essie signed a renewable three-year contract for a studio at 87a Clifton Hill, St John’s Wood, with trustees for the Higgins family who had converted Clifton Mews into Clifton Hill Studios in 1881. Initial takers included Henry Ryland, purveyor of sultry women in late Victorian ideas of Ancient Grecian dress. A workshop was then added at 87a for monumental sculptor Bertram Mackennal – an Australian artist who died in 1931 but whose work continued in popular currency since he had designed the head of George V on the coinage. Essie was promising to pay £40 a year for the new space. As well as pledging not to keep pets, shake cloths out of windows, paint walls or sell pictures from the studio, John was agreeing to a clause that should have raised alarm bells after Abercorn Place. When alarm bells rang he failed to hear them, and now he contracted that he would neither do nor permit: … any act or thing (including singing and the playing of musical instruments) which may be or become a nuisance or cause scandal or annoyance to the other occupiers of the Building or to the Landlords and the neighbours or cause damage to the adjacent properties, but to be quiet and orderly at all times.

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Next door was Adrian Allinson, a ‘friendly man and good amateurish painter’, with whom John was on amicable terms. Adrian, in truth a more accomplished artist than John allowed, had a ceramicist lover called Molly Mitchell-Smith. So marginal a figure in John’s story was to prove a spy and in due course threatened to become his nemesis. Peter Watson sent a note in early May to say that he had recommended John for a show at the Buchholz Gallery in New York, where Henry Moore had lately exhibited, and owner Curt Valentin had replied to say that nothing could be done immediately but asking for more details: I wrote back and told him that you are the painter of your generation and that your only danger was (possibly?) your success! However I expect he will be stimulated… I hear you’ve moved. I hope it’s nice & snug! Do you want me to pay any rent for it? Will you be up next week? I must get clear of the other place so some white washing will have to be done and May 15th is the day! Clearly the outgoing tenants were distracted because, on 26 June, Peter wrote again: ‘Is the flat ready? I must hand it over next Wednesday for better or worse.’ Among paint flecks on the walls, artworks were also to be whitewashed. Both John and Lucian used any available surface when denied paper, canvas or board. With an outpouring of public sympathy for Russia in the wake of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, a coffee kiosk off Leicester Square did roaring business as the Anglo-Russian Café. One night the émigré owner asked the two artists to decorate the stall’s two main walls. Lucian took one and John the other: each did their own thing with idiosyncratic designs seeming neither Anglo nor Russian. Anyway, looking forward to John’s next studio, Peter now sent £20 to cover the first six months rent. The Leicester Galleries had offered John an entrance hall show, with displays of recent work by Jacob Epstein and former Tate director James Bolivar Manson in the more prestigious Gainsborough and Hogarth rooms inside. In all the opprobrium heaped on modern artists, none faced such hostility as Epstein – the level of abuse suggesting anti-Semitism. Still, the sculptor and draughtsman certainly drew attention, and from 18 May crowds flocked to Leicester Square. Pausing in the entrance hall, they came upon paintings and drawings by a young and practically unknown artist. Many liked what they saw. More than thirty pictures – almost everything on offer – sold to the likes of Kenneth Clark, shipping line director Colin Anderson, Penguin New Writing editor John Lehmann, E.Q. Nicholson, Peter Watson and The Poet’s Eye collaborators Geoffrey Grigson, Sheila Shannon and W.J. Turner. A 21-year-old artist was staggered to clear £300 (virtually the London average annual wage). He celebrated with Guinness and oysters at Wheeler’s – and by buying, for £15, a Max Ernst painting from the Surrealist artist’s ‘Loplop’ dove-in-forest series. With its air of claustrophobia

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Tree Root in a Welsh Estuary, 1943 Ink on paper, 31.5 × 51 cm. Tacita Dean Collection

and disorientation, La Forêt was just the sort of thing to disgust people passing the Leicester Galleries. Despite the melancholic nature of the Craxton subjects – dead animals, loners in dark landscapes, torn-out tree roots – there was the panache and vigour of a fresh creative vision. The overall effect was uplifting, with an intimation that something big was about to happen. Waves of excitement from the D-Day Normandy landings on 6 June engulfed John Craxton too. A week later, German V1 rockets were fired from bases near the French and Belgian coasts. Such unmanned doodlebugs or buzz bombs whined over southern and eastern England like aerial motorbikes until the sudden silence of an imminent plunge. Nerves that had withstood the Blitz now shattered. When V1 launch sites were overrun, the menace was replaced by even deadlier supersonic V2 rockets; exploding before the sound of their arrival, they carried on falling into the final weeks of war. Amid the bombardment John penned a pictorial letter to E.Q. in which, on the vertical edges of the paper, a smiling zebra on a golden plain looked across to a V1 rocket and shrieking bird. The centre of the page comprised a snake-like question mark – with the top a pipe-smoking face of comic irony and the dot at the bottom horribly expanded: a human head had been turned into a bomb crater and signed with the name John. Between these images he wrote: … After the jugging long sleepless nights even when the all clear has gone indigestion through fear and worry prevent real sleep the day next morning is strange and one feels cut off from everything its terribly bad really

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because I allways was rather that way … just received proofs of the last lot of lithos after about a month or more of persistant waiting & hell they are as hopless as aunties split bloomers only more skitsoprenick… An amazing thing happened when I last went down into the Bouillerbaise Looch & I took annie goosens [from the family of classical musicians] who jitters like an orange fritter suddenly the whole floor cleared & everyone clapped & yelled & the band hotted up & we were alone it got faster & faster & everyone got more & more excited it was horrible I was so hot – quelle exposition! never again…1 The Bouillabaisse Club in New Compton Street was one of several swing-and-jive nightclubs in and around Soho catering for American troops – and black troops in particular. With more money than Blitzed Brits, they were out to have fun while they could. Bohemian London joined them. From May 1944 the Caribbean Club swung rather decorously on Denman Street, off Piccadilly Circus. Climbing two floors above the Argentina Restaurant, the party-minded rang a bell and a speakeasy-style shutter slid open so they could be accepted or rejected before the door was opened. The big draw was dancing to the Dick Katz Trio – not a quartet since club owner Rudi Evans drew the line at drums. John and Lucian may have bumped into John Minton at the Caribbean Club near the war’s end, just as they had seen Roberts Colquhoun and MacBryde in Soho throughout the conflict. There was no mingling in the painting. On one studio visit John had been dismayed to find the Roberts rubbing dirty varnish into their pictures for an ‘Old Master look’. Their semi-Cubist images would anyway never appear remotely like his. He respected Keith Vaughan, but from an artistic and social distance. Michael Ayrton was loathed for general bombast and increasingly virulent attacks on Picasso and Stravinsky. ‘It is terrible how he really has a physical effect on me and how his persistence upsets me’, Peter Watson wrote in 1942. The patron then added: ‘Ayrton is the purest PETAIN’. ‘He was so puffed-up with his own importance’, John said. ‘He was the last barrage balloon over London that never got taken down.’ So, from the start, John dismissed the Neo-Romantic movement of artists with whom he was most often linked. Later he muttered: ‘Can’t I at least be a Post-Neo-Romantic?’ In public he explained: You are either Romantic in spirit or you are not. You can’t be ‘NeoRomantic’. There was never a Neo-Romantic group as such … There were two groups during the war: the artists around John Lehmann and Penguin New Writing such as Michael Ayrton, John Minton and Keith Vaughan, and then on the other side, with Peter Watson and Horizon, there was Lucian and myself, Sutherland, Colquhoun and MacBryde. When you’re 19 or 20, and somebody is five or ten years older, they have their friends and you have yours.2

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Not that those two cultural armed camps were wholly hostile to one another. John Lehmann admired the work of John and Lucian enough to want to buy it, and both artists were promoted in Penguin New Writing and invited to its parsimonious parties. In Paris, after the August 1944 liberation, the painter and naturalist Peter Scott, Jane Howard’s then husband, searched for the Milkins – John’s sweet hosts from only five years earlier and another world. While dreadful details remained unclear, Peter confirmed Nina’s fears that her parents had disappeared in the Holocaust. As ‘stateless persons of Jewish origin’ they were most vulnerable to the Paris round-ups from July 1942. Eventually it was established that Sophie had been murdered in Auschwitz that same year. Jacques had been ill in Compiègne deportation camp when a doctor wangled his release. Arrested again in March 1944, he had died in Auschwitz months before France was freed. John could only ever say that Jacques and Sophie had ‘died from the horror of it all’ – for the shock of learning their vague but hopeless fate was so terrible to Nina that she was never able to talk of them, or her Jewish identity, again. Of her life in Paris, her children were told nothing except the name of her piano teacher. She drew a curtain over the war years and, at unfathomable cost, determined to speak only as a pianist, and through the universal and eternally life-affirming language of music. In September John told E.Q. he was painting like a ‘crazi mad man’ after returning to his London studio and finding that a burst water tank had soaked a lot of pictures, including a borrowed Epstein nude. Having spent half his exhibition profits in ten weeks, he was postponing a trip to Wales to make good his losses – not least to Lucian: I gave him £10 to help him financially yesterday, today he rushes in & says hes just bought two rugs which fool I told him about & are certainly not worth £12 oh dear its ‘could you ‘lend’ me some more’ now … never mind the great thing is not to lose ones temper even if everything else goes.3 Not yet 17 when the war began, John turned 22 in the embattled autumn of 1944. It seemed that the conflict would never end, and there was a terrible winter and spring to come with Allied advances won at huge cost at home and at the front. The inevitability of victory was less palpable than the impossibility of peace. The emerging enormity of concentration camp crimes, and the revelation of weaponry that could destroy humanity, ruled out calmness for thoughtful minds. Through last months of war in Europe, John worked in his Clifton Hill studio and revisited old haunts in Dorset, Cambridgeshire and Wales, to refresh his spirit and imagination. While at Alderholt he, Lucian and E.Q. arranged a short seaside break in Swanage, where the two men drove fairground dodgem cars – crashing into each other again and again at full pelt until the operator gave them a pound to scram. Lucian worked ever so slowly on a portrait of a lobster in the hotel room he and John shared – until John threw the stinking model over the roof tiles where it broke into putrid pieces. The exquisite picture sold at the Lefevre Gallery in November to Wheeler’s restaurant. Lucian’s West End debut show of paintings

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and drawings, six months after John’s, ran alongside displays for Felix Kelly and Julian Trevelyan. The 27 works included Quince on Blue Table, lent by John Craxton. John carried on missing deadlines, as Peter Watson continued to promote his paintings. Late in November 1944 the patron penned a postcard: ‘Now I must insist. Edge [maker of half-tone and colour blocks for Horizon] can start on your pictures right away so please take Moonscape & Lanes or Moonscape & Reaper to him immediately.’ The New Year opened with a Leicester Galleries’ show of twentieth-century romanticism, in which John participated. Under a sub-heading of ‘Danger Ahead!’ the Observer critic noted: ‘A picture of a hermit among rocks by John Craxton, full of feeling and remarkable in colour, has a literary flavour which unless watched may well strangle the new romantics as it did the old.’ But literary friends could be useful commissioners – and now Cyril Connolly wanted a pair of doors decorated in the grand house on Sussex Place, overlooking Regent’s Park, that he currently shared. The deal was long on delivery. Horizon’s editor finally begged: I have Raymond [Mortimer] & Clive Bell dining with me on Wednesday 5. Is there any chance of being able to present them with a ‘fait accompli’? I know you are in a ‘state’ but it is exactly for such states that the practice of an art has been found so efficacious! What about a nice vine and no more across the top part? 4 In the end, in order to complete the task and enjoy the surroundings – and the sumptuous hospitality ordered by Cyril, paid for by Peter and served by Lys Lubbock – John stayed in the house for several weeks. He would have been happy to move in permanently. On a brilliantly sunny day late in the war, as bombs fell around his Tickerage retreat, Peter wrote: ‘Art & Beauty are all that matters really.’ In truth he was becoming more and more depressed. As Allied forces surrounded Berlin, John went to stay with Johnny Philipps in Picton Castle to recover from another bout of jaundice – working on a self-portrait drawn on green paper. Peter wrote on May Bank Holiday, a week before the German surrender. He longed for ‘a united Europe from Lisbon to Danzig to Athens’; but pessimism prevailed: The world is today much too small to stick to a system which died with Napoleon in 1815. And why wont they? Because people have no vision. Are afraid of being daring & imaginative therefore all the big changes are made by the wrong people such as the Communists or the Fascists for the wrong reasons. And if we don’t make them, they will be made again for the wrong reasons. Sorry to go on but I feel so strongly about this, more strongly than I feel about ART & you know how I love that. Altho’ there is nothing quite like ART is there? But the claustrophobia is increasing & I can’t stand it. Je n’en peux plus.

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THE GREAT ESCAPE

After the Victory in Europe party came the reckoning – and the remembering that war in the Far East went on. Ruined London reeked of soot, ash and dust; rationing was severe and worsening. All looked grey and dreary at a time of making do and mending, and of drab utility that, for John Craxton, rhymed with futility. Tim Craxton had one more act of valour to perform. He plotted with a friend to spring her starving sister from a Dutch prisoner-of-war camp by claiming that they were engaged. Meeting on either side of barbed wire, they were quickly married. After that, as for so many war heroes, peacetime proved disappointing. Tim became a car salesman before moving to America. A general election campaign – bringing a July Labour landslide – saw a popular faith in politics that John could never share. Bicycling to Lucian’s studio, he hated the hectoring Labour loudhailers in Paddington South (a party agent would be fined for outdoor megaphone decibels likened to ‘a brass band in the room’). Delamere Terrace and nearby mean streets in a generally well-heeled constituency provided scenes for the 1950 film about urban violence, The Blue Lamp. The seat stayed Tory. On 13 June John reported a crime drama to E.Q.: Oh oh such goings on around Lucian Sunday last I finished drawing Lucian at studio & I byked off to his place just in time to catch three young gangsters clearing out Loochies flat of clothes guns money etc they whizzed off like lightning with his money & pistol thank heaven left his clothes all neat in cases ready. Now Ive been body guarding (as if I could) Lucian as we make furtive and tense rendezvous in back allies of Paddington. They are all armed with razors & things & they are all amazingly young about 14– 15 – though they look 22 or 23. There are rival gangs and all is brewing for a terrible feud over Freud – but trust me I wont be there. Two of the gangsters were evidently trailed by C.I.D. today and they found Loochies gun on them. Loo has no document for it so now is in a terrible state – really these Romantics…1 In August the dropping of two atom bombs shook the world but spurred a formal Japanese surrender on 2 September – six years and a day after global hostilities began. Everyone was exhausted. In a long hot summer, John and

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Lucian yearned to be abroad but foreign travel was still impossible. Julian Trevelyan recommended the Scilly Isles, as did John Wells, a painter then practising as a doctor on the main island of St Mary’s. So they went – calling on Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth in St Ives en route. Repelled by backbiting in the Cornish modernist art colony, John was to have a lasting friendship with E.Q.’s brother-in-law and admire his personal journey into abstraction. Wherever John travelled, Essie sent packages – cheques, forwarded letters, art materials, clothes, food, ration books – in his wake. Her note in the latest relief parcel added an ironic touch: ‘It is good news to hear that you are having such a very enjoyable time. You mention food and weather but not a word about work. Are you able to combine the three?’ For once she need not have worried. The Scillies proved a creative turning point for her pleasure-seeking son. Forty-five kilometres from Land’s End, the Scilly Isles are an Atlantic archipelago that seems to have drifted to the Aegean on the Gulf Stream – with rocky landscapes, white beaches, cobalt blue seas and sub-tropical vegetation. At first the two painters stayed at the Mincarlo guesthouse overlooking St Mary’s harbour, with yuccas in the garden and stones like dinosaur eggs set in the garden wall. Through a telescope, Lucian watched a girl undressing in a neighbouring house – until he saw her father looking in another telescope back at him. John and Lucian then made haste for the most exotic island, Tresco. Here they lodged with the Locke family in Point House, where Julian Trevelyan had stayed. His Surrealist’s commendation of the place ended: In the sitting room there are two armchairs and a sofa. In the morning the fleas are on the armchair by the window, in the afternoon they move to the armchair by the fire and in the evening they all meet up on the sofa. John painted while Lucian drew, side by side in their bedroom – the only studio they ever shared. Both wanted outdoor days: exploring, sketching and pursuing a new object of fascination. On the Scillonian ferry, during a rough crossing from Penzance, they had fallen for beautiful Sonia Leon, who was turning 17. Lucian’s attention was diverted from another girl since she was being sick. Sonia’s father, a Harley Street doctor, had been glimpsed by his wife and daughters one day hurrying along Oxford Street and never seen again. Mrs Leon remarried, to a shipping line owner, and moved to Park Lane. Now they were to holiday on the Scilly isle of Bryher. John and Lucian crossed from Tresco in a little boat to find Sonia; she returned with them and was unable to get back that night. Her mother was furious, but probably not surprised. Born a Montefiore, Mrs Leon had set her daughter on a bohemian path, packing her off in the Blitz to stay in Brighton with her friend Gertie Millar, star of Edwardian musical comedies but by then widow of the 2nd Earl of Dudley. Sonia studied fashion design at the local art school but, on a lifelong flight from boredom, her passion was for jazz. Back in London, she, John and Lucian danced to music by Django Reinhardt, when many thought that she and John were lovers. At Le Petit

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Red and Yellow Landscape, 1945 Oil on canvas, 30.5 × 40.5 cm. Private collection

Club Français in St James’s John introduced ‘Soni’ to Clifford Coffin, who photographed her for Vogue. He hailed a dream model, with clothes hanging from her as if from a pencil. For now, on the Scillies, she was resisting all appeals from both painters to sit for a portrait. Thwarted artistically and sexually, Lucian turned again to the girl who was no longer being sick. Tresco – ‘less organic than Pembrokeshire … but more full of poetic imagery’ – was an awakening for John Craxton. Dark imagery from wartime Wales was now rendered luminous by Miró-like red, blue and yellow lines flashing around the black bulk of Point House and its stony setting like rainbow lightning. Inspiration from banded colours on tarred French fishing boats led to an explosive Tresco scene wrought in red and yellow, with black cut to shadow. Lean male figures with enormous feet – large enough to cross continents – now stalked dislocated landscapes. John worked on island memories for months, with a glowing study of spiky vegetation in green and blue a jacket for Geoffrey Grigson’s The Scilly Isles and Other Poems. A small oil, given to E.Q. Nicholson in the New Year, expressed his prevailing feelings with an image of a lobster-catcher on a Scillonian shore. It was called Greek Fisherman – from a body of men the artist had yet to meet. John and Lucian had been welcomed aboard Breton fishing boats, to drink

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Jacket for The Isles of Scilly and Other Poems by Geoffrey Grigson, 1946

Calvados with the crews. Such vessels had been used for wartime missions to the French coast and the visitors had already been impressed by the heap of empty gin and whisky bottles left behind by agents staying in Point House. Now they plotted to become stowaways to get to Brest and then Paris, to see the Picasso Libre exhibition and even the artist himself. Two escape bids were foiled by harbour police. In the end they returned to London, after John wrote to E.Q.: ‘you may think that England’s a Free Country it is perhaps until you try & leave it!’2 Three years later, with artist and model so easily diverted by life, John embarked on his magnificent Portrait of Sonia. It was incomplete in 1956, when Sonia married the writer Peter Quennell, after they met on a train. She was his fourth wife and gladly gave way to a fifth. They parted as friends, Sonia taking the portrait that John had eventually finished as a belated wedding present (the background foliage like a bridal garland) and the nickname ‘Spider’, given by Peter because he thought she looked like a spider monkey. Spider had been a great success with Peter’s friends such as Cecil Beaton and Cyril Connolly. ‘I had no pretensions’, she recalled, with habitual candour. ‘I was completely superficial and it charmed them.’ She claimed never to have read a book – prompting Cyril to declare, ‘I’m going to do what Spider does, and arrange all my books in colours’.3 She was to live in Munich and Rome with the producer and screenwriter Wolfgang Reinhardt, who bought the rights to The Sound of Music for $9,000. The couple lived in style until Reinhardt’s death on profits from the stage and screen adaptations though, typically, Spider saw neither. Based latterly in New York and London, and dabbling in interior design, she remained the image of her Craxton portrait – the youthful, jazz-

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loving figure with the briefly penetrating gaze before the renewed flight from boredom. In their eighties, decades after they had ceased to see Lucian, Spider and John shared a birthday party. The trip to the Scillies had dire consequences for Lucian Freud. Letters from the girl he pursued when Sonia rejected him were discovered by Lorna. She dropped him when he had also taken up with the actress Pauline Tennant, and refused all entreaties to renew their affair. ‘I thought I was giving you up for Lent’, she said. ‘But I’m giving you up for good.’ In John’s opinion, Lucian seduced Michael Wishart, Lorna’s son, in a bid to get at Lorna. He was certain that his friend vowed thereafter never again to love a woman as much as she loved him. Near the end of the war, through the ever-helpful offices of Horizon, John and Lucian met the Greek Surrealist writer Nanos Valaoritis, whose first poems had been published in 1939 when he was just 18. Plans for a rendezvous in a Piccadilly restaurant were muddled by messages passed to the wrong people, so the trio swapped identities to match the errors for surreal entertainment. Nanos anyway had amazing stories to tell – from his recent escape to London via Turkey and Egypt to the family saga, or myth, of how the Venus de Milo statue lost her arms in a tussle while being stolen from one of his ancestors. The friendship flourished. John decorated the 1947 Valaoritis poetry collection

Portrait of Sonia, 1948 –57 Oil on canvas, 76 × 76 cm. Tate

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Punishment of Wizards (see p. 164) with a drawing of a girl framed by fig leaves. His then wife, actress Anne Valery, claimed it as a portrait of herself. Late in 1945 Peter Watson showed John some photographs posted by an unknown Greek painter called Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika – Nico Ghika – for possible inclusion in Horizon: We both immediately recognised an exceptional mind and talent, & it was our delight then that here was an artist who had combined the liberating philosophy of Cubism with the landscape of Greece. The Mediterranean had claimed back what it had inspired in the first place. The two artists met at a pre-Christmas dinner party hosted by Cyril Connolly. Nearly 40, cosmopolitan Nico Ghika was paying a first visit to Britain. Born in Athens and descended from a line of Greek admirals, he had been drawn to Paris at 16 – just like John. He had then returned for lengthy studies, a first solo show and collaborations with avant-garde figures such as artists Jean Arp and Jean Hélion and architect Le Corbusier. Back in Athens he was at the forefront of the Greek modernist movement. He stayed in London for several months – painting cityscapes (one Soho panorama delighting in the name of Greek Street), sorting exhibitions and conducting a clandestine love affair. Nothing like as austere as photos suggest, he was passionate and playful – translating Edward Lear’s nonsense poem ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo’ into blissful Greek. Looking back on nearly fifty years of friendship, in notes for Nico’s obituary in 1994, John applauded a restless painter-philosopher, forever embracing new ideas: He could turn his mind to architecture, sculpture, the nude, still lives, landscape, portraits, theatre designs – his exhibitions showing a subtle mastery of every medium. His complex and astonishing visual & verbal memory never impeded his natural gift for painting & colour but were the means for a freedom & joie de vivre that left him alas a rather lonely figure in the hierarchy of modern Greek art.4 Ghika appeared like an Odysseus, bringing hopes for an invitation to join him on the voyage home to Greece when John and Janet, on a cycle ride to Hampstead Heath, found their lifelong London anchor. A bayed and turreted artist’s house was now empty and shell-shaken, with broken door, smashed windows and a For Sale sign in the garden. Atelier – 14 Kidderpore Avenue – stood between St Luke’s Church and the lodge C.F.A. Voysey built for his father. The Arts and Crafts house had been designed in 1901 by Arthur Keen for the plein-air painter George Hillyard Swinstead. Behind the extravagant street façade, an enormous studio ate into a small plot prompting Swinstead’s 1910 book The Story of My Old World Garden And How I Made It in a London Suburb. Harold could teach here amid a warren of family, students and strays, so the Craxtons

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Architect’s drawing of 14 Kidderpore Avenue by Arthur Keen

pushed the boat out and bought the place for £4,250. To deter squatters, John repaired the door and slept on the floor. A ‘ghastly’ seventeenth-century German painting of children holding animals, bought in a bundle from Lisson Grove, plugged a hole in the linoleum. At last, in a bitingly cold January of 1946, John was able to revisit Paris – with cash, entry permit and contacts provided by Peter Watson. From his patron’s plundered Rue du Bac flat, he headed for the Rue de Seine, where Picasso and Miró dealer Pierre Loeb was reviving his Galerie Pierre after wartime exile. The gallerist expressed interest in showing works by John and Lucian but gave no firm commitment. Tipped off by Peter, John went to Le Catalan restaurant. Across the room he saw a stylish woman smoking a cigarette and knew this was Dora Maar, the model for Weeping Woman. However distorted, Picasso’s portraits were recognisable likenesses. The sculptor Alberto Giacometti walked in, then Picasso, acting ‘like a king and child mingled’. He drew on the paper table covering and when he left, the patron carried off the picture for his collection and his pension. John hadn’t dared move. Soon afterwards he wrote excitedly to Lucian: Saw an epileptic fit in Monmartre as dramatic a performance as to delight you 20 cloaked gendarmes chasing in mad circles the mad stampede the gestures of a madman – & then tea with Picasso and Pierre Loeb both of whom you will meet soon for they are completely charming & young in spirit … I eat with Picasso & Co in a little restaurant called Le Catalan … They want me to live with them in the summer & their daughter stays in town at our place.5 Craxton chickens were being counted in Le Catalan. When Picasso was met again with Lucian the great man’s fleeting interest lay in the famous Professor

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Freud rather than the two novice artists. Far more than these brief encounters, the work was the thing: ‘From Picasso I took danger. He made you walk a tightrope. He made you relook at nature and rethink what a painting should be.’ While walking in a Parisian street Lucian was to have a chance meeting with a Catalan artist called Javier Vilató – an encounter that was to bring John a lasting friendship over many later visits to the French capital. Javier, an excellent printmaker, had followed his uncle to Paris, where the two men remained confidants. The uncle was Pablo Picasso. Meanwhile, John had a passing relationship with a gay man called Hans Ulrich Gasser, with whom he shared a hotel bed. Gasser, a Swiss art dealer known to Pierre Loeb and Peter Watson, had a more interesting proposition: a Craxton show that spring in his Zurich gallery. Meanwhile, he opened his contacts book and produced an introduction to Christian Bérard who, in a room filled with opium smoke, wept while recalling Christopher Wood. The dealer then accompanied John to London, where Essie opened a tin of chocolate biscuits saved through the war for a special occasion, but now reduced to sawdust. Luckily Gasser was more impressed with John’s pictures. There was much to see in London that New Year, starting with a Victoria and Albert Museum display of Picasso and Matisse paintings. A major show at the Lefevre Gallery mixed recent works by Ben Nicholson and Graham Sutherland with others by Bacon, Colquhoun, Freud, MacBryde and Trevelyan – plus nine Craxtons (Scillonian pictures and a self-portrait). February brought the Royal Academy’s Exhibition of Greek Art 3000 BC to AD 1945 – a survey from Cycladic figures to Ghika paintings attracting 72,000 visitors. A Minoan stone bowl base and Cycladic marble jar were lent by the widow of John Pendlebury, the dashingly romantic Knossos excavator executed by the Germans during the Battle of Crete. Kenneth Clark lent several ancient and Byzantine pieces. Eight works by El Greco included Mark Oliver’s figure of a saint drawing. Ghika also featured in a Modern Greek Art show at Greek House, Grosvenor Square, and five of his pictures appeared in the March issue of Horizon. Having been such a poor student, John was now persuaded by Clive Gardiner to teach at Goldsmiths. He needed money and hoped to appropriate materials for his own art, but teaching proved a nightmare. Classes of ‘suburban girls’ giggled when told to draw a cabbage. ‘Think of it as a green rose’, he pleaded. There were yawns when he took in an Ancient Greek pot for another still-life study. And then a bearded, thickset and bellicose older man exploded in a life class when told that he was placing the head on the model’s neck incorrectly. ‘Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?’ the student stormed. ‘What did you do in the war?’ When John said that he had failed an army medical, the aggressor yelled: ‘Bloody cheek! Don’t bother me again.’ John informed Clive Gardiner, who said: ‘He’s just out of the navy. His name is Tom Keating.’ ‘He couldn’t draw for a toffee’, John recalled. ‘He just copied everyone else.’ And that was his encounter with the future art forger. Through the Courtauld professor and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt he also came to know

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Hare on a Table, 1943–6 Oil on board, 51 × 63.4 cm. John Craxton Estate (on long-term loan to Pallant House, Chichester)

another masterly faker, Eric Hebborn, who was eventually murdered in Rome. John was relieved to be asked to leave Goldsmiths after barely a term when he sought time off for foreign travels – and delighted that Cecil Waller replaced him. As part of his preparations for departure to the Continent, John finally completed the oil painting Hare on a Table that had been forming over three years. Also wrought in Durer-like Conté and pastel, the image encapsulated his feelings about Britain: no still life was stiller than this dead animal, the embodiment of speed reduced to limp fur, stiffened sinew and clouding eye. It stood for every atrophying thing he wanted to leave behind. With all his pictures produced, framed and packed – some reclaimed from a small show in a rare books shop known as the St George’s Gallery, most being ever barer and brighter reflections on light in the Scilly Isles – John left in the spring for Switzerland. Pausing in Paris, he renewed creative acquaintances – especially with the mayfly that was Olivier Larronde. Turning 19 and already acclaimed as a poet, a golden youth would decline into drugs and destitution. For John Craxton, pleasure was always a protection. The pleasure seeker thought he had disembarked on a different planet in a Swiss railway station café serving coffee and croissants with lashings of black

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Self Portrait at a Window, spring 1946 Conté pencil on paper, 22.5 × 26.5 cm. A gift to Olivier Larronde. Private collection

cherry jam and butter. He marvelled at a country with crisp air and clear views, where everything was spotless and pristine after the smog, dust and debris of London. When the spell had dulled, he wrote to Aunt Sylvia: The Swiss deep down are like all races denied access to the sea impossible & so snobbish & uneasy going but what a wonderful country really & so well run & incredibly clean… Horizon was putting together a Swiss issue and everyone seemed to have time to spare, so John joined Cyril, Lys Lubbock and the magazine’s New York agent Tony Bower on a tour. Peter Watson wrote: ‘I don’t envy you lying on a mattress with Tony Bower but maybe it’s delicious!’ Peter advised visiting art collector Robert von Hirsch in Basle. Better still was John’s two-day inspection of the late Paul Klee’s Berne studio, guided by the artist’s widow. On the second afternoon he recognised a small work as half of a painting seen on the first morning. As a reward, the astounded Lily Klee-Stumpf offered him the reunited picture of a city at night for the equivalent of £8. ‘She might as well have asked £8 million’, John said. For all the Watson benefaction, he was being forced to sell his Max Ernst painting to fund his travels. Lily had been a pianist and Paul a violinist, and John enjoyed her company despite her sad air. Five months later she suffered a fatal stroke when her only son, Felix, returned from a Soviet labour camp. On 17 May John sent a postcard to Janet just before the Craxtons moved to Kidderpore Avenue. Now studying oboe and piano at the Royal Academy of Music, his favourite sibling learned that the appeal of Switzerland was fast waning: I’m writing this in a tiny canoe on the red hot sunny lake … Zurich is not really a nice town despite its Garden of Eden look. The people here are too German Swiss and don’t understand the Craxton attitude to life.

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He was staying at Belp, near Berne, with Rolf and Kathie Bürgi – art collectors and friends of the Klees – and things had got rather sticky. In a rowing boat on the red hot lake he had kissed Mrs Burgi while a jealous husband watched on the shore. Back at the house he found his host cleaning a gun with ominous deliberation. It was time to leave. The Craxton attitude to life was based on tremendous luck and synchronicity – gifts that did not desert him now in another hour of need. At a dinner to launch the Zurich show, John sat next to Lady ‘Peter’ Norton (née Nöel Evelyn Hughes), who with her diplomat husband had narrowly escaped from Poland at the start of the war. Sir Clifford Norton served as a British envoy in Switzerland during the conflict and was now Ambassador to Athens. Lady Norton was a gift from the gods. She had co-founded the London Gallery in 1936 and staged shows by Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy and Edvard Munch before resigning to join her husband in Warsaw. Peter Watson said: ‘She’s even more art mad than I am.’ Now she asked John about his plans. He said that he longed to be in Greece – and the sooner the better. Then he mentioned the name of Joan Eyres Monsell, who was working as secretary to the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster for his job as press attaché in the Athens Embassy. Joan and Peter Norton were great friends. That clinched it. Lady Norton had left a borrowed bomber in Milan during a mission to buy curtains for the threadbare embassy. She would give him a lift. The Craxton exhibition had barely opened when the artist vanished. He left behind all his unsold pictures – some to cover the bill for fine new art materials. He never saw most of them again, despite numerous attempts at reclamation. In Milan the ambassador’s wife took him to a Modigliani show in a whitewashed garage; then, on 11 May, to a box at La Scala for Arturo Toscanini’s return from exile in America. They were crowded among guests of the conductor’s contessa daughter, in an opera house rebuilt after bombing and now filled beyond capacity. The Italian programme – Rossini, Verdi, Puccini; novice soprano Renata Tebaldi – was rapturously received by an audience including tens of thousands listening via loudspeakers in the cathedral square. Happiest blending high and low life, John filled his scorecard in Milan by running into Raymond Mortimer and smoking Greek hashish in the critic’s hotel bedroom. Lady Norton joined them – she liked a full life too. With Liza Paravicini, Somerset Maugham’s daughter, they raised glasses of absinthe: toasting freedom in a spirit that Fascism had banned. Finally they were in the air and on a journey the 23-year-old painter had longed for practically all his life. Suddenly he was in no hurry. ‘I’ve never seen Venice’, he announced wistfully. ‘Could we take a little detour and have a look?’ ‘Lovely idea’, said Lady Norton. That is how, a year after the war, a Boston bomber came to swoop so low over St Mark’s Square that pigeons ‘flew up like confetti’ as the aeroplane ‘shot up the piazza … just missing the campanili’.6 Nerve-shattered Venetians also scrambled for cover.

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Far below the borrowed bomber, Italian terrain gave way to Greek in a shift of tone and colour as if in an abstract painting. Thick plantings in dry yellow fields turned to the older, wilder, paler and purer. The rumpled landscape now appeared barely cultivated and almost unmarked by roads. Islands looked like terracotta shards mottled with grey vegetation and rimmed in white marble. And the land was held within a sea-and-sky spectrum of brilliant blues: aquamarine, sapphire, azure, violet, indigo. These Aegean hues would have been the defining glories of Greece but for the greater impact of light and shadow – signalling that everything under the sun would be in sharper focus here. The aeroplane landed in Attica, at the military airfield of Eleusis. What is today an industrial suburb of Athens was then an ancient settlement separated from the capital by 25 kilometres of olive groves, market gardens and natural landscape. The birthplace of Aeschylus and thus of Greek tragedy was connected to the big city by the Sacred Way, the processional route for the ancient cult of the Eleusinian Mysteries. This was the path John Craxton followed in May 1946, in a British army vehicle laid on for the ambassador’s wife. When Lord Byron first saw Athens, in 1809, it was a mouldering town of 10,000 people. Now the population was a hundred times bigger, lately swollen by refugees from war destruction elsewhere. In the six years before John’s arrival 400,000 of the seven million Greeks had died, with many Athenians starving. A collision starting in 1940 with Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas’s refusal to surrender to Mussolini, had moved through atrocious Nazi occupation to the most savage conflict of all: civil war. In December 1944 Communist-led resistance fighters had battled with British troops for control of the city, the contest determined by greater firepower and, following a Christmas visit by Winston Churchill, a treaty to hinge the king’s return on a plebiscite due in September 1946. The city John entered was sprawling across the central Attic basin between the four mountains of Aigaleo, Hymettus, Parnitha and marble-quarried Pentelicus. It was largely a low-rise affair of baked red tiles and white, grey and yellow plaster, with pastel-shaded buildings in poorer districts, all set amid the greenery of yards and gardens. Modest and graceful structures swirled around several hills, with Lycabettus the highest, and the Acropolis the most imposing given its Parthenon crown. The American writer Edmund Wilson, taking the Craxton route into Athens the previous summer, described his first glimpse of the fifth-century BC temple to the goddess Athena as ‘astonishing, dramatic,

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Self-Portrait, 1946–7 Oil on paper, 32.3 × 23.2 cm. Private collection

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divine, with at the same time the look of a phantom’.1 Further ruins, ancient and modern, lay all around. An impression of both spaciousness and wreckage hardened in streets with broken profiles where buildings had been blown to rubble. John’s arrival coincided with the opening shots in the main phase of the Greek Civil War, which was to be fought beyond Athens and mostly on the mainland from the Peloponnese northwards through Thessaly to the border provinces of Epirus, Macedonia and Thrace. Athenian political circles were a verbal minefield. John seemed scarcely to notice any of this, given an immediate and permanent assault on his senses. The devastated city was bathed in spring light and perfumed with citrus blossom and honeysuckle. Malnutrition was still rife but tin cans on steps and windowsills bore aromatic sweet basil to flavour meals of tomatoes. Fingers of wilderness stretching into the city centre smelled of pine, thyme and sage. John arrived with returning nightingales. A natural sensualist was utterly seduced. On 20 May he wrote to E.Q. Nicholson: Oh Queee! I cant tell you how delicious this country is & the lovely hot sun all day and at night tavernas: hot prawns in olive oil & great wine & the soft sweet smell of greek pine trees. I shall never come home. how can I? 2 They drove amid trams, buses, taxis, bicycles, horse-drawn carts and donkeys to the British embassy – on the corner of Vasilissis Sophias Avenue and Loukianou Street. This neoclassical mansion, painted pale pink, had been bought from the widow of Eleftherios Venizelos, the Cretan revolutionary leader turned Greek national statesman, in 1936. The building was under Swiss protection during the German occupation but in the front-line of December 1944 battles. From the spring of 1946 it was being brilliantly revived as Lady Norton adorned the walls with major paintings of international modernism and filled reception rooms and garden with gatherings of artists and intellectuals. Sir Clifford Norton was aiming to build Anglo-Greek political and economic ties, still with the military element fostered by his controversial predecessor, Rex Leeper, but increasingly with the persuasive weapon of culture. However, the ambassador was less than delighted by John’s unexpected arrival, so Lady Norton lodged him above a garage. Here, thanks to embassy gardeners, he began learning the demotic Greek that would make his eventual mastery of the language so distinctive – an earthy vocabulary spiced and spiked by Craxtonian wit, shocking some but charming many more. He loved mimicry and swear words, puns and subverting formal masculine, feminine and neuter associations for expressive and comic effect. Once, when he called a friend who was staying with a grand Athenian family, a maid entered the drawing room to announce that a lorry driver was on the phone. By then John had long concluded that fluency in everyday Greek speech flowed best via ‘one bed and two pillows’. During the upheavals in Athens of late 1944, a battalion of leftist women – rifles over shoulders, fists hammering the air – had marched along Andrea

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Syngrou Avenue shouting ‘Down With Virginity!’ Their slogan was an assault on the whole social system. It failed: feminism was then vanquished in Greece for decades. In ongoing Orthodox society women spoke quietly, if at all. Girls were cloistered until arranged marriages, usually while still teenagers. Virginity was part of the wedding dowry. A corollary of the segregation of the sexes is greater homosexuality: young men who prefer to be with women have sex with other men in order to ease the pressure and pass the time. In Greece, as John Craxton encountered it, same-sex physical romance and release was just another dimension to the warmth of masculine friendship – a fact of life perfectly attuned to his open nature and sunny spirit. What lay in store was a lot of fun. On 22 May Peter Watson wrote from London: I envy you Athens. Other days, I have been so happy there on several visits … Greek art still makes everything else trash. Just soak it all in as much as you can. If you get the chance go to Epidaurus and Olympia the most magical place in the world. Peter pressed John, as he was pressing Lucian (‘he leaves tomorrow Seine-side’), to find time to draw in a Parisian art school. Lucian himself was already looking beyond France, towards joining his friend in Greece. Europe was reawakening in a new dawn, with the sun-drenched south beckoning most beguilingly. The sensuality of resurgent life was captured at this moment by the great Greek poet, essayist and public servant George Seferis. He looked on as treasures of the National Archaeological Museum were dug up once more, following reburial during the German invasion. Divine classical limbs, torsos and buttocks emerged at random as the statues were unearthed. ‘It was a chorus of the resurrected, a second coming of bodies that gave you a crazy joy’, the poet wrote.3 Just 17 months earlier, Churchill’s forces had held little more of Athens than the central Kolonaki district, between the British Embassy and the Hotel Grande Bretagne on Syntagma Square. The landmark hotel was still ventilated with bullet holes, though dynamite laid in the sewers for the war leader’s visit had not been detonated. Between those two unlikely fortresses, the bastion of the British Council offices stood on Kolonaki Square. Since Greece was effectively the first battleground of the emerging Cold War, even though Stalin tacitly conceded its place in the UK-US sphere of influence in return for Soviet sway over the rest of the Balkans, culture was a propagandist priority. An illustrious operation in Athens was headed by the Byzantine historian Steven Runciman and included the writer and traveller Maurice Cardiff and the classicist and experimental novelist Rex Warner. Rex’s assistant – as Deputy Director of the British Institute of Higher English Studies – was Patrick Leigh Fermor, a romantic figure with the looks of a matinée idol and a life from an adventure novel. The live wire known to all as Paddy had failed spectacularly in formal education, before taking a meandering walk, at 18, from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople. Learning by looking, reading and talking, he fast became

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Paddy at Lixouri, Cephalonia, by Joan Leigh Fermor, 1946

a walking encyclopedia able to speak, sing and bedazzle in numerous languages. Setting out on his marathon trudge with high-powered introductions and potent personal charm, but next to no money, he had slept in barns and stately houses with similar delight – his exultation in being alive matched by John Craxton. The outbreak of the Second World War had found Paddy living in a lemon grove with a Romanian princess, above a Peloponnesian shore with a view to Poros island. Enlisting into humdrum army life, he looked like failing again until joining the Special Operations Executive and the partisans on Crete. Together with Billy (W. Stanley) Moss and a small band of Cretan fighters, he kidnapped the island’s German commander, General Kreipe, and spirited him over the White Mountains to a waiting British boat. The glory was terrific, the reprisals terrible. While pulling off the next to impossible, Paddy could be fatally clumsy – accidentally killing a resistance comrade while oiling a rifle. The dying man forgave him, but the bereaved family did not; so a Cretan war hero became the target of a blood feud. At a party in Cairo late in 1944 Paddy met Joan Eyres Monsell – still taking photographs but now helping the war effort via a clerical job at the British Embassy. The next September Joan was posted to Athens and Paddy followed her. When John arrived they were embedded, despite many separations then and later, as lovers and lifelong companions. Although not marrying until 1968, they were always the Leigh Fermors. Joan had been the first person John had contacted in Athens. So he was able to correct Lady Norton’s take on Paddy’s habit of sharing his rooms with visiting Cretans with whom he caroused late into the night. She drew the inevitable conclusion until John informed her that his new friend – with whom he was now partying in Grande Bretagne bars, Kolonaki cafés, hashish dives and bare-earthed tavernas in Plaka lanes below the Acropolis – was a tireless hedonist. Sexually he was open-minded where others were concerned, while being basically (but perhaps not absolutely exclusively) straight himself. Paddy’s alter ego was Alexander Wallace Fielding, always known as Xan and very soon known to John. These glamorous free spirits were irrepressible and unemployable. Xan, born in India and raised in Nice by his grandmother,

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had been running a Cypriot bar badly when the Second World War began. He had gifts for friendship, languages and subversion, and excelled in ridiculously daring resistance activities in Crete and France where he was much loved and never forgotten. Ever a traveller, he became a writer and translator. Paddy and Xan directed John to Crete and provided crucial contacts. John introduced Lady Norton to Nico Ghika and his characterful wife, Tiggie (short for Antigone) – a poet who, after spirited conversation over taverna suppers, might lead the room in communal singing. Most importantly, John was instrumental in cementing the bonds between Nico, Joan, Paddy and himself, and from their first meetings in Athens the cosmopolitan quartet – with no children to distract them, though many friends besides – would be joined forever in a grouping of emotional and creative support. The time and talents of each member of this private party were to be always at the service of the others, to the immense enrichment of all their lives. The sole tensions – and these only in passing – would be between John and Paddy: they had a striking similarity, with reckless charm that could become a dangerous liability. There were times when Paddy thought John went too far – though he himself went farther. Just as Paddy was on course to be sacked from the only peacetime job he ever held, charged with having too good a time at government expense, John’s joie de vivre soon fell foul of closing minds and doors at the Athens embassy. There was a disastrous dinner at which Sir Clifford’s patience ran out when the insouciant artist displeased the guest of honour: Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. Earning a reputation as the Spartan General, that was more fitting than the friendly nickname of Monty, Bernard Law Montgomery had served with doughty distinction in two world wars. He had gained a bullet through a lung at the First Battle of Ypres in 1914 and a formidable record as a driven and egomaniacal commander scoring vital victories over Hitler in North Africa, then in the fore of the Allied advance through Western Europe until taking the German surrender. Churchill said of him: ‘in defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable’. At the embassy dinner the military martinet’s interrogation of John over his nonexistent war record and suspect moral fibre drew flippant retorts, and they in turn sparked umbrage. Although the friendship and patronage of Lady Norton would continue (first off with a £15 monthly allowance), it was only diplomatic that John should be evicted from the embassy forthwith. On an aeroplane, after his Athens visit, Montgomery wrote a note of thanks to the Nortons for liberal hospitality within which he had felt wholly at home and ‘able to be myself’.4 It was a privilege he did not extend to others. Paddy recommended the nearby island of Poros. Carrying little more than art materials, John took a bus to the port of Piraeus, separated from Athens by wasteland and still fairly blitzed from German parting shots. He boarded a steamer ferry and, in a crowd of conscripts, salesmen and peasant families with babies, bundles and livestock, headed out past Salamis and Sounion and into the blue Saronic Gulf. He was almost certainly the only non-Greek on the boat.

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RITES OF PASSAGE

Poros is hardly an island. It resembles a hip of rock hacked from the side of the Peloponnese then cut in two: Sphairia, with the port town; and larger and wilder Kalavria – the mismatched pairing linked by a narrow isthmus like a yacht and dinghy roped together. The strait between mainland and island has been fancifully described as a Greek version of the Golden Horn or Venice’s Grand Canal. The American writer Henry Miller waxed yet more fantastical when he likened arrival here to floating through the town in amniotic fluid: ‘To sail slowly through the streets of Poros is to recapture the joy of passing through the neck of the womb.’ Perhaps his travel memoir The Colossus of Maroussi was the more lyrical for having been published in the fateful year of 1941. Looking back decades later, to ‘the happiest place I have ever known’, Lawrence Durrell wrote: Poros is a most enchanting arrangement, obviously designed by demented Japanese children with the aid of Paul Klee and Raoul Dufy. A child’s box of tricks that has been rapidly and fluently set up against a small shoulder of headland which holds the winds in thrall, it extends against the magical blue skyline its herbaceous border of brilliant colours, hardly quite dry as yet…1 Alighting on the quay, John rejoiced in his first Greek island – its name translating, appropriately, as ‘Passage’. Moreover, Poros is a rarity among the 6,000 islands of Greece with a name taking a masculine form. The distinction is apt since the naval headquarters of the modern Greek state were established here in 1828. Much of the appeal of Poros for John Craxton was the old base turned naval training college. A stream of potential models and companions now flowed. Asking a bystander about lodgings, he was directed to a house in the street above the harbour. Here, as usual, he landed on his feet – moving in with a family much like his own. His new landlady, Efstathia Mastropetros, had known better times in Addis Ababa until her husband was defrauded by a business partner shortly before his early death. All that remained was a house on Poros, to which Efstathia returned with her children in 1930. The first floor was rented to a priest and half of the ground floor was also let, to leave a family of six sharing two rooms. The four sons and one daughter of

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The Mastropetros house, Poros

the house – Yannis, Dinos, Maria, Petros and Grigori, aged 16 to 24 – became John’s Greek cousins. The Mastropetros residence, a compact neoclassical house from 1893, had an impressive outlook. John was awarded a first-floor room with the best views. When Lucian arrived in September he got the room behind John’s, with connecting doors between what became their bedroom studios. Other rooms on the upper floor were closed off and supposedly locked – filled with the belongings of the absent priest. At some point the inquisitive visitors acquired a key. In the meantime, John had more than three months to settle in and claim the territory as his own. His room looked out over a lake-like stretch of sea busy with boating: naval vessels; wooden fishing and mercantile caique schooners; pleasure craft; ferries plying between Piraeus and Saronic Gulf ports and rowing boats criss-crossing the 350-metre straits between Poros and the mainland town of Galatas. Beyond ranged light and dark green slopes of Kalavria – a sparsely populated wilderness with deeper shades being pine forests yielding resin as a preservative for retsina, the staple Greek white wine. One of few visible buildings, just above the waterline, was Villa Serenity, belonging to the Dragoumis family. Designed by Anastasios Metaxas (architect in Athens of the 1896 Olympic Stadium and the Venizelos house turned British Embassy), the Italianate mansion stood proud on a stone plinth, painted Pompeiian red and extending into bay, balustrades and terraces. For John’s first Greek landscape painting, Hotel by the Sea, the villa was pared back to basic building blocks and bleached a searing white. True to the Sutherland dictum that an artist should use sources only as a starting point, in this declaration of love for Greece the ‘hotel’ is also the steamer that brought him to Poros, while the ghost of the bay barely visible in an end wall echoes the apse in the lime-washed Byzantine churches of Greece that were already a source of fascination. Five years later, Villa Serenity became a hotel for a decade.

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John produced Hotel by the Sea in an ecstasy of discovery – diving at once into the faceted and fractured planes of light and colour that would define his early Aegean pictures. The strong blues and greens and dazzling whites were a stark contrast to the blur of murky London. The penetrating light revealed everything in art as well as in life – exposing all character traits and emotional longing, striking flesh and bone: the essence of the physicality of life in Greece. Moreover, almost lost in the geometry of the abstracted landscape, a goat forages on a fig tree. The first living thing in a Craxton painting of Greece will appear forever in charge of the scene. Linked to Pan – horny Greek god of shepherds, flocks and wildness – goats have been domesticated since Neolithic times for milk, fibre, meat and hide. The animal element adds tension to the picture, being a symbol of resilient life and a plunderer in paradise. As John said: ‘Goats are essential domestic animals in the Mediterranean and yet they destroy the landscape, nibbling away at the trees and devouring every green shoot. My paintings comment on life but it is all implicit.’ Hotel by the Sea is a visual poem. It was swiftly followed by a more prosaic Beach Scene rendition of the Glamour Hotel – then a 12-room pension having the sandy strand at Askeli, on Kalavria, all to itself until mass development from the 1960s. The artist would have joined the Greek families frolicking in the water, save for the fact that – despite all those Selsey summers – he still could not swim. He was further motivated to set down initial impressions by the promise of an Athens exhibition thanks to new friends at the British Council. He would work all day then wander along the quay in the evening. Watching the sunset behind the Peloponnese, he savoured the rocky silhouette of Methana as it lived up to its local name of ‘The Sleeping Maiden’ most vividly. Eventually the female profile would feed into his art, notably as a backdrop to a ballet (p. 209). Although John generally ate with the Mastropetros family, he sought sustenance of another kind late into the night in sailors’ bars and tavernas – joining the steadily more riotous assembly and carrying on with his lightning sketches as musicians played, conscripts danced and plates and glasses flew. Now began the multitudes of black-and-white snaps of young men, usually in naval uniforms, posing singly or with John at taverna tables laden with bottles, glasses and cigarette packets. Diminutive and drained of colour, they remain bright with electric energy and possibility. Names such as Andreas, Christos, Giorgos, Nikos and Vassilis proliferate, and among the changing company there are formal portraits of John’s special and more upper-class friend at this time: Yannis Athinaios. Also, he was now helping an untrained 17-year-old painter called Rigas Despotopoulos, who had grown up on Chios and seen only icons and illustrations and whose work was ‘full of intensity and drama like Chagall’. John would take him to London and assist his later career in Paris. Even then, a cadger was a patron too.

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Hotel by the Sea, 1946 Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 61 cm. Tate

Villa Serenity

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Drawing portraits, Salonika

In glorious high summer weather of mid-July, John learned with sadness of the death of Paul Nash. He had died in his sleep while revisiting favourite scenes in Dorset. Aged only 57, the pioneering creative spirit was killed by heart failure due to long-term asthma. This mysterious threat to breathing occurs when irritants cause constriction of sensitive airways – possibly worsened, for Paul Nash, by an allergic reaction to art materials. John, in contrast, now felt that he was breathing freely at last. Until he found himself in Greece, almost every Craxton portrait had been emblematic – near to far distant – likenesses of himself. Now, as if by magic, he became a consummate portraitist of others. Youthful self-absorption was blasted away by Aegean light and life. Preferring to record specific portraits in swiftly made drawings, rather than within the more distilled, imaginary and gradually evolving elements of his paintings, he said: I arrived in Greece knowing I couldn’t draw but I would sit down in front of a man, say in a marketplace, surrounded by hordes of children, and somehow think myself into the man, allowing his image into my personality and then drawing almost unconsciously. I got amazing likenesses in 20 minutes. They thought it was uncanny. I’d made myself into a machine – a camera. Greek people loved posing for portraits – though they might also be caught unawares. One youth was sketched in court defending himself against charges of stealing 63 pumpkins from a blind man. However deep the

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hardship etched into the lines of prematurely aged faces, there was an essential gaiety in the Greeks; even the most serious countenance seemed on the point of breaking into a smile – if not bursting into laughter. John Craxton noted that winning tendency and reflected it in his own character. The resulting portrait could prompt astonishment and alarm. On 7 June John dashed off a drawing of long-haired, wide-eyed Tasia. The likeness was so exact, and so sublime, that the girl’s parents feared her soul was being stolen and they wanted to lock the image away. Poros, like the rest of Greece, was in thrall to primeval superstition – with a bedrock of pagan beliefs poking through the plethora of Orthodox churches and attendant Christian rites, rituals and festivals covering much of the calendar. Now John took great pains to convince Tasia’s father that the teenager’s soul was safe in his hands, since he would never part with the picture. The promise came back to haunt him when he sold the drawing to Anthony West, writer son of authors Rebecca West and H.G. Wells. The buyer hung the image in his study but his wife became so jealous that John had to exchange it for an innocent landscape. Usually in Greece, the act of drawing was a welcome intimation of the divine: Greeks, and I also include those Greeks who sat for so many fayum portraits that have survived, seem to regard a portrait as a passport to immortality. Often in the presence of a painter they assume a pose with the eyes winging their way into an idealised future. They are in their prime, and so they would always remain. The portrait photographers of Greece when I first went there were kept busy retouching the faces of their sitters – removing double chins and unshaven five o’clock shadows.2 Amid civil war a compulsory 30-month military service for every young man could mean a death sentence. Youthful portraits acquired a period pathos. Parents with any clout kept their sons out of the army, where tours of duty might be summarily ended by injury or fatality – or else extended. The air force was safest but closed to all bar the luckiest and best protected. Naval conscripts were fairly fortunate; apart from the interception of caiques with arms for the rebels, guarding the seas was a relatively peaceful affair. There was a lot of marching to brass bands in the training college grounds, and sauntering arm in arm along the quay. In the tavernas youthful high spirits soared, after alcohol, into singing and dancing as records or live musicians played. Greek poets entered popular culture with lines set to music and then learned and sung by young and old alike. Thousands of folk dances, from the pan-Hellenic syrtos to the Cretan pentozali, had been handed down the generations, with the hassapiko originally a medieval battle mime by the butchers’ guild of Constantinople. In the sailors’ bars of Poros, the star turn was a conscripted Cretan butcher called Kostas Alexakis. Swarthy and impressively moustached,

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An Acrobatic Cretan Butcher, November 1947 Oil on canvas, 66 × 91 cm. Private collection

he had large, lazy and slightly bloodshot eyes. His speciality was not the hassapiko but a solo dance called the zeibekiko – and any idea of sloth ceased when he took to the floor. Clicking thumbs and fingers, and with carefully controlled steps, he circled an upturned chair in his white uniform like a seagull. Then, with a firm forward thrust, he grabbed the top two legs and somersaulted backwards over the chair, to land cleanly on his feet and continue dancing. John sketched the performance and befriended a fellow artist. The Craxton goal was to mix with all strata of society. He returned frequently on the ferry to mingle in elite Athenian circles, where he conversed in the French favoured by the Greek upper classes above their own native language. And he was soon friendly, after an introduction from Mrs Mastropetros, with the leading hostess on Poros. Hailing from the powerful Tombazi family, Mina Diamantopoulos looked in her own imposing person like a Greek Valkyrie (and was actually a quarter German). The Diamantopoulos house, at Love Bay on Kalavria, was reached by a 90-minute row or two-hour walk west from Poros town. A nearby Russian naval base, though abandoned by the early 1900s, was a reminder for Mina of her four-year-old self attending Tsar Nicholas II’s coronation when her father was Greek ambassador to the imperial court in St Petersburg. She married an Athenian pharmacist and poet of delicate health, who wanted to retire to Poros

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and the companionship of his library. His stalwart, sociable and multilingual wife, who long outlived him, embraced a spirit of adventure – swimming to a family estate on the Peloponnesian shore and back again, regardless of prevailing currents. When the Germans came, she rose valiantly to the challenge – confronting the authorities and running a clinic and a soup kitchen that saved many lives. In old age she asked: ‘What is fear? I have never known it.’ John grew closer still to Mina’s sister-in-law, the painter and resistance heroine Aleca Stylou Diamantopoulos, and her paediatrician husband, Stamatis, who had looked after the children of the late King Paul. They lived in a neoclassical villa with a scented garden in Plateia Mavili in Ambelokipi, then on the edge of Athens, and this became John’s base of first choice during city visits until the end of the 1950s. John and the sisters-in-law had not only love of the arts and other people in common. They shared a passion for cats: Aleca had as many as six; Mina had at least twenty. On Poros John began to relish some of the deepest satisfactions of Greece – what he termed ‘the persistence of myth in everyday existence’. Names seemed to confirm this, being handed down from grandparent to grandchild (Sophocles, Pericles, Achilles; Demetra, Phaedra, Electra). Ordinary people in rural areas still eked out livings in confined landscapes; but, in an expansive storytelling culture, with a view of the cosmos recognisable to Homer. The young Englishman had only to enter a simple rustic church to glimpse the glories of Byzantium, while appreciating that old centres of Christian worship were likely to have been built on older temples – and that caves dedicated to St Anthony were once sacred to Pan.

Cats Playing, 23 November 1955 Conté pencil and charcoal on paper, 34 × 49.5 cm. Private collection

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A modern artist alert to history roamed to two sites on Kalavria. On a wooded slope running down to the sea, monks at the eighteenth-century Monastery of the Life-Giving Spring welcomed him with sweet water and a spoonful of preserved fruit in syrup, and showed him icons and graves of naval commanders from the Greek War of Independence. One midnineteenth-century icon was painted by the Italian artist Raphael Ceccoli in memory of his daughter who had been cared for at the monastery until succumbing to tuberculosis. The parallel was lost on John Craxton, since he was unaware of his own underlying medical condition. Consumption, a disease of damp and crowded conditions, was rampant in a Greece whose swamps were also breeding grounds for malaria. More evocative still was the ghost of the sixth-century BC Temple of Poseidon. Constructed on a high plateau catching morning sun at the most propitious moments, it was long since dismantled for building projects across Poros and Hydra – pines now growing where columns once stood. Here the Athenian orator Demosthenes, who had opposed the expansionist Macedonia of Alexander the Great, sought asylum in 322 BC then drank hemlock to avoid capture. Best of all was the coastline with its deserted coves and inlets and offshore isles reached by rowing boat. The smallest islet turned out to be the top of a ship’s funnel. The rest of a three-masted schooner used as a naval supply vessel, and scuttled during the German invasion, was clearly visible below the surface of the water as a lure for boy divers. It was called Kichli – Ancient Greek for thrush.

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LUCIAN AGAIN

In late August Lucian sent a telegram care of Lady Norton. It announced that he was sailing from Marseilles on the Corinthia, arriving at Piraeus on 5 September, and directed John to meet him. Such an instruction caused instant offence at the British Embassy since it was addressed to ‘HMS Norton’ – confusing an art patron with a warship. The relationship never recovered from that torpedo at the start. Already the ambassador’s wife had written to John to send him his monthly allowance and complain: I have had a somewhat peremptory telegram from Julien Freud about his visa for Greece. This is something I cannot help with and especially as I do not know if he has made any financial arrangements. People coming from England arrive with £5 and I cannot undertake to help anyone more at the moment.1 The diplomatic irritant was put out in turn to find himself in Piraeus with no John Craxton awaiting. In their friendship each had always put his own interests first; now John was detained in Athens planning his December exhibition. After that bumpy start, an old amity quickly resumed. They were coming together in a week when the Greeks were pulling further apart. More than 68 per cent of voters in an 88 per cent turnout were now said to have backed the return of George II. Even with the fraud by pro-royalist and anti-Communist forces that monitors reported, the referendum gave a guide to the division of opinion in what was about to become a worsening civil war. Lucian was surprised to find that his friend now sported a moustache in the Greek fashion (and on and off ever afterwards). Sigmund’s grandson did not realise that this was primarily a sexual statement – a masculine defence against the apparently widespread belief among Greek manhood that visiting Englishmen craved passive sex. John wanted to keep his options open and not to fall into anyy camp. His manner, if sometimes arch, was neverr camp at all. Oblivious to the concerns of others, Lucian settled led down to toil on a portrait of John. So long in the execution, ution,

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Portrait of a Man by Lucian Freud, 1946 Oil on canvas, 24 × 19 cm. Private collection

the lightly painted study of a sallow Englishman landed in foreign parts borders on caricature. It re-creates the model’s moustache but adds sunburn that the artist himself suffered. In reality John was deeply tanned after four months of sunshine. The ‘absolute misery’ of protracted sittings would never be forgotten: He always started with an eyeball, then he imprisoned the eye and then an eyebrow, then a nostril, then he couldn’t decide where to put the mouth and then an ear – the ears are always in the wrong place … He had a tendency to put the head on one side and to make the faces lop-sided. Finally, in less than an hour, John responded to the painful progress of Portrait of a Man (the anonymity in the title surely telling) with a riveting drawing clearly titled Lucian. He depicted a sensual figure behind a forensic gaze, and with what was as yet a determined rather than disdainful note in the clenching of his lips. Still only 23, he was far from the look that novelist Ian McEwan would read as ‘ferocious, consumed … quite frightening’.2 John held on to the drawn likeness for 47 years, as a relic of youthful friendship, until a sale to the art critic Brian Sewell. Lucian also sat for the Craxton painting Boy on a Blue Chair, but none save the artist and model could spot that connection. Known to the Mastropetros family as Johnny and Loocey, they both produced superb portraits of 18-year-old Petros. He must have had amazing patience to pose for the Freud painting. Lucian worked on an icon-like image;

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Lucian, 26 October 1946 Conté pencil on paper, 56 × 43 cm. Private collection

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Boy on a Blue Chair, 1946 Gouache on board, 121 × 81 cm. Arts Council Collection, South Bank Centre, London

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Head of a Greek Man by Lucian Freud, 1946 Oil on panel, 28.4 × 24.8 cm. Private collection

John cast the sitter – with a future career in the naval police – as a sleeping fisherman even though the actual thing was readily to hand. Lucian applied the same near-religious fervour to miniature studies of tangerines and lemons in celestial light. That analogy is all too apt for one painted on the cover board of a nineteenth-century Greek Orthodox Bible. The two artists had stolen into the locked rooms of the absent priest and rifled through his possessions. Emerging with a torn-out souvenir, Lucian loved the resulting joke – concealed from everyone bar himself and John – behind an image that might have been painted in a medieval monastery, for an illuminated manuscript. John likened the fruit pictures to ‘little bits of paradise’: Both Lucian and I applied a lot of undercoat to create a smooth surface and to allow the colours to shine through. I wasn’t interested in the textures of working on raw canvas as so many people were at that time, and instead I wanted the effect of a brush flowing across a piece of paper – as in early Miró, or de Chirico and a lot of Picasso. Lucian had abandoned the thick impasto style he’d been taught at Benton End and was using oils as Memling did tempera. While a dearth of sitters drove Lucian to self-portraits, John’s likenesses of young people on Poros came to include several images of eight-year-old Eleni Psari. She lived unhappily with an uncle and aunt who were neighbours of the Mastropetros family. In rare oil portraits John captured the transition from a confident child to one twisting hands and facial features in anguish. The artist was faithfully setting down an impression of homesickness – a

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Frontispiece for The Punishment of Wizards by Nanos Valaoritis, 1947

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disease of the spirit he himself had never felt. But then nostalgia is a Greek word. Experienced by Odysseus on a ten-year voyage from his home island of Ithaca, it was handed down through many generations of a Greek diaspora. They went to Athens, where John wanted to see his poet friend Nanos Valaoritis, to discuss the Craxton frontispiece for a pending volume of Valaoritis poetry. Nanos recalled: Johnny identified much more with the Greeks, though Lucian was very perceptive. ‘The Greek people live in a metaphysical world,’ he said to me, which I agree with, both pragmatic and quixotic, and this is shown in their poetry. Lucian had this uncanny way of entering people’s psychology and feelings in an instant. While in Athens they had been received by the surrealist poet and psychoanalyst Andreas Embirikos. ‘He was the first psychoanalyst,’ Lucian said ‘that I liked’ which I thought was very funny.’3 For John and Lucian the big drawback to Greece was a lack of money. Britons could take only £100 abroad each year; raising even that sum was a challenge for the young artists. Both still had family support and John was subbed by the two Peters. At one stage Lady Norton stumped up £45 in six weeks and was then petitioned for another fiver (while also being asked to provide paper, pen nibs, antiseptic ointment, sandals, swimming trunks and a lorry to transport pictures). She was rewarded with a design for the Nortons’ Christmas card, and help with furnishings in their private rooms. When funds for full board came in (£2.50 a week), Mrs Mastropetros cooked up a feast – one celebratory lunch running to aubergines, peppers and vine leaves stuffed with rice and herbs, fried octopus and fishes, tangerines and coffee. Or the lodgers might eat a fish course in a taverna garden, then chocolate, cakes and coffee in a café. Their favourite delicacy was a small cake covered with powdered sugar and smelling of rancid goat’s milk. When skint, their belts tightened. At one famished point Lucian considered presenting himself to consular officials as a Distressed British Subject in the hope of being airlifted home, and John wondered whether Lady Norton could stretch her helpful way with aeroplanes. The artists took water taxis to Galatas for explorations of the Argolis mainland. They hiked in the mountains – collecting aloes and agaves as props for pictures and being deeply impressed with hospitality offered by poverty-stricken families of herdsmen. They were greeted with milk and dried bread, and waved off with gifts of fruit, walnuts and cheese wrapped in fig leaves. One resulting picture is called Greek Farm. Another, Galatas, shows a welcoming family with an amphora from which oil or wine had been poured since ancient times. John told their landlady that if anyone called on strangers in England, dogs would be unleashed. ‘And they would give you a dog bite to take home with you.’ He thought of this while working

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Greek Farm, June – July 1946 Oil on canvas, 49 × 60.5 cm. Private collection

on Galatas back in London, using Greek drawings. It was painted over a Welsh picture since a new canvas was too costly. In early October the two friends had a week’s break on the Saronic Gulf island of Spetses, taking a house belonging to an aunt of Nanos Valaoritis. Lucian taught John to swim in the sea as a 24th birthday gift. They stayed in a white village clustered around two small harbours, set against a hilly backdrop with a few olive groves and terraced fields. The rest of Spetses comprised primeval pine forest. Roaming with sketchbooks, Lucian drew a fig tree and John plotted an abstracted landscape to be completed back on Poros. Five years later a young John Fowles taught English on Spetses. He fell for the wildness of Greece in long spells of solitude that helped him to find his novelist’s voice and led eventually to his saga The Magus. Spetses is the Fowles island of Phraxos, ‘a place so beautiful, quiet and empty that it verged on the terrifying’. No surface water – boats replenished rain cisterns – meant no antiquities and few wild animals, although the author was haunted by the call of collared doves forever asking ‘who-are-you?’. Exiled from English society, he knew that an artist must enter ‘deeper exiles still’:

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In most outward ways this experience was depressive, as many young would-be writers and painters who have gone to Greece for inspiration have discovered. We used to have a nickname for the sense of inadequacy and accidie it induced – the ‘Aegean Blues’. One has to be a very complete artist to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet…4 While still finding their visions, John and Lucian were very complete artists. Lucian would remain in Greece for five months during which he produced the most beautiful work of his life. John never really left, in every sense finding himself in Greece. What discouraged and depressed other artists was for him the stuff of pure, and profane, joy. Meanwhile, Peter Watson had just written from Paris in the ‘blackest depression’ over an imminent return to London and fears that it would be ‘impossible to leave ever again before the next war’. He sent his protégé bleak encouragement: Civilisation is just stopping in front of one’s eyes as far as I can judge with a coming winter of mass destitution and starvation. All optimistic & positive opinions seem a mockery. And the problems of art pure anachronisms … The only peace possible is to get oneself into the sort of island you are in somewhere and forget the rest in your work. On 16 October, back from Spetses, John and Lucian met George Seferis. He was in a Villa Serenity house party with his wife Maro’s family. The poet wrote in his diary: Yesterday, sunny until afternoon. I stayed at the shore all morning, taking dips or reading the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad. When it grew dark, a starry sky. At that moment John Craxton and L. Freud arrived, two young artists I have been hearing about ever since I came here … The former is an Englishman, the latter, grandson of the great Freud. They are enjoying Greece, where they find things they don’t have in their own countries: light, and a different kind of human rapport, they say.5 Seferis was also a seeker after light. At this point he was a fortnight into a two-month stay on Poros – his first long break since before the war and years of exile. He had just served as private secretary to Archbishop Damaskinos, Greek Regent until the referendum, and was now wounded and exhausted by the spiralling mid-twentieth-century tragedies of Greece. The poet had been born Georgios Seferiades, in 1900 near Smyrna (now Izmir), with his childhood idyll a village on the Asia Minor coast. In September 1922 his relatives joined the Greek evacuation from burning Smyrna, while George was studying in Paris. Alienation and the search for home were key themes

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in his writings ever afterwards – and, while steeped in mythology and history, and in the richness of a language evolving over millennia, he became the embodiment of modern Greek culture. At Villa Serenity, ‘the house by the sea’, Seferis gathered up ideas jotted in journals over previous months for the complex and paradoxical poem ‘Thrush’. From a meditation on lost houses, the narrator swims out to the sunken boat that will give the work its central motif and title: And the boys who dived from the bowsprits go like spindles twisting still, naked bodies plunging into black light with a coin between the teeth, swimming still The vessel represents the ship taking Odysseus to the underworld, where he learned the way home to Ithaca, and the verses end with a voyage into a ‘light, angelic and black’ both symbolic and literal. Sunlight on the sea so overpowered the poet that in the end he had to close the shutters of his room – ‘letting in only the dim light of the north’ – in order to complete the poem. For all the doleful gravitas of his long-suffering public face, George Seferis had a child-like capacity for joy in making things that mirrored the mindset of John Craxton. Beachcombing on Poros, the writer found ‘a paradise of playthings’. He whittled a cypress wand, fashioned a doll from a walnut and acorns, and carved an anchor-shaped mermaid in cedar. The double-tailed mermaid became a personal symbol – the two tails the salient feature because, as the poet-craftsman put it, how else could mermaids have sex? When he and Maro built their house in Athens in 1960 John designed mermaid lamps in tubular metal. Paddy Leigh Fermor sported a Seferis-style mermaid tattoo. Poet and painters shared an enthusiasm for Greek shadow theatre – and especially for the cunning and darkly comic pauper protagonist of Karaghiozis – playing just then in Poros. After meeting at Villa Serenity, they walked to the town hoping to see a performance. But the principal puppeteer had been summoned to Athens, so his assistant entertained them by imitating with guitar sounds a German Stuka raid on a ship. The evening ended in a thunderstorm. Next morning poet and painters were separated by what Seferis called ‘a hyperborean fog’. The downpour had released fresh fragrances from the autumnal earth as the three artists went about their business in a new day. Maro’s daughters, Mina and Anna, 20 and 16, were part of the Villa Serenity party Mermaid design for Seferis lamps

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with their friend Thali (Efthalia Argyropoulou), who came from a well-to-do Athenian family and had been studying in America. Anna remembered: Lucian was so handsome, so dynamic, but he didn’t speak to us. John was the friendly one. We liked him a lot. Thali was very beautiful, with blue-green eyes like a cat. Something happened between Thali and Craxton; she escaped one night to find him. Once, we were being rowed in a boat with her mother, a very formal lady, who had come to see how she was getting on. Suddenly Thali saw Craxton and Freud walking on the shore to the monastery. She called out ‘JOHN! JOOOHHHN!’ but he didn’t hear her. So she jumped overboard with all her clothes on, and swam after him. Her mother was astonished.6 E.Q. Nicholson had alerted John to the pending arrival of her writer friend George Millar, who, by way of an extended honeymoon with his wife, Isabel, was sailing a ketch called Truant through French canals and over the Mediterranean to Greece. In Paris they were received by General de Gaulle, since the gorgeous George was as much a war hero to the French as Paddy was for the Greeks. After they had anchored in Love Bay, John rowed across to greet them: We saw a lanky youth in a faded blue shirt, the wool singlet worn beneath appearing in the neck opening, khaki drill trousers touched here and there with oil paint. Athenian sandals worn over white socks with yellow stripes. Brown hair grew on his small face like bushes that seek to encroach on and smother a herb garden, and this effect was underlined by a wispy moustache growing outwards from the division of his upper lip, as though the besiegers had managed to land a feeble airborne force. He drank two glasses of iced ouzo carelessly, with the speed of a rooster’s seduction…7

Truant with George Millar by Lucian Freud, November 1946 Lithograph, 10.3 × 14.3 cm

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VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY

On 13 November 1946 a Greek warship approached Poros bearing a British cultural expeditionary force. Out from London, John Lehmann was calling on George Seferis, and along the way would recruit John and Lucian for the art photographic pages of Penguin New Writing. The ship placed at the service of the arts ambassador also carried British Council luminaries in Athens, Maurice Cardiff and Rex Warner. On board too was the Colossus of Maroussi, George Katsimbalis, editor of the influential Anglo-Hellenic Review. Rex and Maurice checked progress of the imminent Craxton show, then the vessel set off with an expanded cultural crew for the neighbouring island of Hydra and the Ghika house, where John and Lucian were already welcome visitors. The creative conversation paused for swimming, just when benighted Britain was braced for one of the coldest winters on record. Nico Ghika presented John’s exhibition in Kolonaki Square, with a speech at the launch reception on 2 December. The sponsor introduced John to painters Yannis Tsarouchis and Yannis Moralis, with whom he would remain on cordial terms while they all lived. An ease to John and Nico’s friendship contrasted with the tension of a Craxton show. A photo exists in which the artist has taken a picture off the wall and is improving it on the floor half an hour before the opening. The crowded reception was a demonstration of the Anglo-Greek alliance, with political and military figures among guests from the social and cultural elite of Athens. John alighted on to this milieu like a butterfly – leading to light friendships with society hostesses and shipping magnates John Carras, George P. Livanos and Stavros Niarchos. His exhibition note stated that ‘painters stand now for freedom more than ever’. He proved the point at the party by accepting an offer from a dashing naval officer, who looked as if he had stepped from an El Greco painting, to join a Christmas and New Year cruise. First there was an exhilarating night-time voyage to Poros with Lady Norton on a motor launch lent by the British Army Commander-in-Chief in Greece. The water-borne chariot bearing the ambassador’s wife – plus female friends and John and Lucian – shot across from Athens in barely an hour, covered in spray as it skimmed over the sea. John led them to a hashish and opium bar where mangika songs were played on lute-like guitars. He noted with glee that mangas meant rascal – as borne out by depraved-looking young men who swayed dreamily as they danced. One picked up a chair in his teeth and lifted it above his head. The ambassador’s wife was impressed

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(as the dancers were with her). She and her guests slept in a hotel and Mrs Mastropetros hosted them all for breakfast. Then John was off again with his patron and her friends on the motor launch, despite the onset of ominous weather – leaving behind an impression that he would be bound from Athens for Crete and then probably for London. Lucian was furious to be excluded. As the boat sped away, George Millar reported: ‘We all felt a little depressed, particularly Freud, who talked, as he accompanied us to Truant, of the impermanence of life and the probability of early, sudden, violent and tragic death.1 Later Lucian would justifiably claim that John had abandoned him when a more attractive proposition came along. Further resentment at being left alone with no provision for Christmas dinner was less fair, since 25 December was not then a major festival in a Greek religious calendar focused on saints’ days and, most especially, on Easter. In any event, Lucian wrote to John that he and the Millars had enjoyed a ‘very sumptious’ meal of chicken and plum pudding at the Diamantopoulos house.2 Maybe the party left at the harbourside had misunderstood, or John was unclear of his next moves. Most likely he had kept his true plans secret so as to protect his freedom from the intense scrutiny and perversity of Lucian Freud. For all his fervid heterosexuality, Lucian had just made the second of two drunken passes at John – the first was on their trip to the Scilly Isles. Both were rebuffed. Even during their close proximity on Poros, John kept a photo beside his bed showing the seated Lucian, wearing a football shirt, holding the stuffed zebra’s head and bearing the gaze of a mesmerist. That, like the portrait drawing, suggested infatuation. It would have been natural for him to extend their friendship into physical union; but they remained in their separate beds each night, the connecting door closed between them, because John never trusted Lucian enough to surrender so much information about himself. Given Lucian’s cruel streak, he felt he was being tested and feared emotional blackmail. So, to this extent, Lucian was kept in the dark. ‘I never knew Johnny was queer’, he said. ‘Not for ages.’ 3 John was soon jumping ship at Piraeus to strike out with a ‘wonderfully raffish’ crew and a captain whose cabin he was to share. The adventure had barely begun when a storm forced them to shelter below the Sounion headland and the Doric temple to Poseidon – where John wrote to E.Q.:

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some [of the crew] want to go off & sacrifice somebody … as a gesture to Poseidon, thank god Im thin & meagre & would carry no weight with the ‘old boy’. so here we are sheltering every minut more fishing boats come in refuge from the knife slashing winds there are now 30 boats here & the clouds scream & whine through the tall pillars above us its wonderfull. in a cave on the beach some fishermen have built a fire to cook with coated crouching figures under the overhanging rocks huddled together for warmth. some fishermen have to cook there as their boat is loaded with benzine. In the small hut built taverna above them dark inside & filled with men round a stove drinking koniak & smoking a young man sings sad songs from Crete on a sort of lute that has only two strings left outside even the scraggy chickens huddle up silent by a stack of summer tables. this land of extremes!4 The winter pleasure cruise masquerading as a naval patrol eventually reached Paros in the Cyclades, where, in crystalline weather, the passenger’s sore throat was cured by boiled camomile flowers. Then he nearly choked with mirth when the captain gave a reception for local bigwigs. The mayor and other dignitaries arrived in a dinghy being pulled on a rope. When they stood up to board the boat, the rope swung violently and knocked them all into the water. The crew were in agonies trying not to laugh. John was sorry when they parted at Rhodes, the main island of the Dodecanese, in the south-eastern Aegean, then being transferred from Italy to Greece. With no permission to land but armed

Bigwigs Overboard, 25 December 1946 Conté pencil on paper, 24 × 31.7 cm. John Craxton Estate

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with introductions from Tambimuttu and Paddy Leigh Fermor, he passed into the care of Lawrence Durrell. Larry Durrell, the 5ft 2in literary colossus of Rhodes, replicated Paddy’s agile mind and bull-like energy. Born in India, he had hated his schooling in an England he called ‘Pudding Island’. He led a family migration to Corfu and escaped to Alexandria in 1941. Now he was working as a press officer to the temporary British military authority in the Dodecanese, while really focusing on his writing. John had just read the Durrell memoir of Corfu, Prospero’s Cell, published to acclaim in Britain in November 1945. One line stuck with him: ‘Other countries may offer discoveries in manners or lore or landscape; Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself.’5 Larry was living with his companion Eve Cohen (Justine in The Alexandria Quartet). They had taken the gatekeeper’s lodge of the Mosque of the Murad Reis, across the road from the British Administration headquarters, where blind eyes could be turned to their unorthodox ménage. Their garden was an overgrown Ottoman graveyard. Drinking, laughing and singing among marble tombstones – topped with turban or pineapple according to the deceased’s gender – their parties lasted late into the night, the revellers finally shutting up when the resident mufti rattled his window shutters. Larry was working on his Cretan novel Cefalu (reprinted as The Dark Labyrinth) and his extravagant praise for the wildest and southernmost island of Greece was not lost on John Craxton. Presented as an eminent cultural visitor, John was lodged in the deluxe Hotel Grande Albergo Delle Rose, where he was regarded with snobbish suspicion by British military personnel whom Larry Durrell derided as ‘drapers’ assistants in uniform’. John was much happier after moving to the decrepit Hotel Apollo opposite. Larry found him a jeep and driver to tour the island, and a boat to visit Kos and the sponge divers’ island of Kalymnos. Then he secured a passage back to Athens on a ‘great rusted hulk which had taken tanks to Normandy’. By now Lucian, back on Poros, was posting New Year greetings to a girlfriend: ‘I am on a most amazing island … Johnny Crax is here but has dissapeaed [sic]. I hope the Bandits have not got him.’ 6 John landed safely on Ios, between Naxos and Santorini in the Cyclades. These stark white mid-Aegean islands appeared to be little more than the marble from which Cycladic figures were carved in earlier millennia. Given their ineffable beauty, such enigmatic sculptures seem to lay down an impossible challenge to later artists to come up with anything better – like one of the tests for mere mortals set by Greek gods. On Ios an English painter with a passion for archaeology gauged the lie of the land in the nearest coffeehouse – the main social haunt of masculine Greece, with strong coffee and ouzo served in the cloistered shadows to the clack and slap of komboloi beads, playing cards and backgammon counters. The Craxton habit then and later was to tap local expertise rather than waste energy in aimless wandering. ‘Has old pottery been found near here?’

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he would ask coffee-house customers once conversational courtesies had been exchanged. That gambit led to fruitful locations, the best passed on to professional archaeologists. This time a young shepherd used the Greek word kalytera for something better. His father, Angelos Koutsoupis, was improving on old originals and could be visited. John then met a shepherd who, ‘although naïve was a truly talented sculptor’, with two fine bas-reliefs ready for the tomb of his wife and himself. Koutsoupis explained that an Athenian antiquities dealer had sent photos of a seated Cycladic harpist in the National Archaeological Museum for him to copy. The carving, from a grave on the island of Keros dating to 2800 BC, had lost its lower arms and hands, so a true artist added them in his own manner. ‘Alas, they are completely out of style with the rest of the figure and Cycladic art of the 3rd Millennium BC,’ John said. He continued: Koutsoupis made me a sketch of what he had done & gave me a Cycladic torso he had made as a gift. I once showed this to Henry Moore who became so enthusiastic that I confess I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was a fake. I sometimes see fake Cycladic works in fine museums, preferring to keep quiet and salute in silence a truly remarkable man from Ios who I met on his Cycladic island years ago.7 So fine a raconteur as John Craxton did not always prefer to keep quiet – and now he gave the story to the Sunday Times and collaborated with prominent archaeologists on a scholarly exposé.8 It had already proved too good a tale to suppress when, in 1979, he came face to face with the Cycladic harpist of the twentieth century AD – a figure of perfection right down to its modernist finger ngertips. John was being shown highlights of New York’s Metropolitan Metro Museum of Art by John Pope-Hennessy, a friend from an earlier stint directing the British Museum. Pausing at the harpist, one of the Met’s most lauded treasures, the curator drawled: ‘I really don’t care for it’. ‘Oh, I do’, the painter answered. ‘But then I met the man who made it.’ He went on to relate how the crafty maker had aged his carving in a stream for six months. When co convincingly encrusted in limescale, the copy was sent to the Athens dealer who sold it on to the Met for an en enormous profit. When recounting this saga to others, John loved the shock he was likely to engender. To an exclamation ‘Ar you saying that one of the greatest works in the of ‘Are Metropolitan Museum is a modern forgery?’ he responded: Metro ‘The sstone is genuine and really old.’ No longer promoted as an ou outstanding Met treasure, the Cycladic harpist remains on di display.

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He nearly had not lived to tell the tale. In January 1947 the rusted old hulk in which he was travelling hit a storm and broke down north of Milos. The engine had died and the crew went on strike until the captain persuaded them to return to work at gunpoint. In his darkest night John spotted a light in the far distance and the captain radioed for rescue. A ship finally appeared and towed them to Piraeus. John was a nervous wreck. For all the peril on the sea, Greece had few roads – and fewer still after the war. Water remained the most reliable means of transport, as it had been since ancient times. Still, in 1946 the ferry trip from Piraeus to Kalamata in the Peloponnese meant a 36-hour voyage. Slowly at first, the rising numbers of passenger boats would open up the country to tourism – and speed emigration. Now anxious to leave, Lucian arrived in Athens with pictures for their joint London show. Despite his disgruntlement, the friendship held – he had anyway been preoccupied with his own affairs during John’s absence, while also plotting an abortive plan for the two of them to pedal through Italy and France on Millar bicycles. Embassy contacts got them on to another old hulk plying to Marseilles. No food, no cabin. In the bunks above them two English seamen were being repatriated. One said: ‘John, Loochie, won’t we be glad to get away from this food with all these flavours.’ In hills outside Aix-en-Provence John considered taking a cabin in the grounds of La Tour de César, a primitive chateau belonging to the artist and author Meraud Guinness, who had been a lover and patron of Christopher Wood. Instead, borrowing the fares for the night train to Paris, he and Lucian went to the flat of the Greek-French art historian Christian Zervos – whose expertise ran from antiquities to modern art and who would eventually compile a Picasso catalogue raisonné – after an introduction from Peter Watson. Zervos and Picasso were arguing in another room. When they eventually appeared, the painter was in a foul mood and clearly wanting to get away; John gave him a copy of his exhibition catalogue. But of most importance was an encounter with the painting Night Fishing at Antibes – it would have the biggest impact on John Craxton of all Picasso’s pictures. Completed when the Second World War was starting, the study’s central motif of two boatmen fishing with lamps, handline and spear was a Mediterranean image familiar from Poros. The overall composition, rendered in startling colours like a midnight fireworks display, gave John his own rocket fuel. Lucian sold a painting of lemons to Marie Bonaparte to pay for the last leg of their homeward journey. He could not wait to get back. John grew more and more wistful, wanting to retrace every step as quickly as possible. As he put on a postcard to the Mastropetros family: ‘I am getting colder and colder and as I go north pray for me. Europe is a big refridgerator.’ They landed in England, in early February, to Arctic cold. Gales and blizzards brought transport chaos and severe fuel shortages. Food rationing was at its worst, with potatoes now included as pneumatic drills tackled root vegetables frozen into the ground.

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The BBC’s Third Programme – the Craxton family’s favourite radio station – and magazine production were suspended. Horizon had weathered the war but lost its March 1947 edition. John worked best on his Greek pictures when removed from the scenes that inspired them. His productivity rose with distance from the distractions of taverna life, though in London regular trips to the talking and pick-up pubs of Soho were resumed. But, temperamentally, England never suited him. He froze. Most of his artist friends and acquaintances had a similar yearning for the south, though few acted on it so decisively. One exception was the previously Anglocentric Graham Sutherland. In April the Sutherlands drove through France for a first visit to Provence. This trip changed Graham’s life and art – resulting in a first portrait (the writer Somerset Maugham, a monstrous mandarin against a backdrop of brilliant orange). It was as if sunlight opened his eyes to others, just as it did for John Craxton. John Minton travelled to Corsica with poet Alan Ross that summer thanks to a book commission. Francis Bacon preferred Monte Carlo casinos. John finally got to meet him in London around this time, thanks to Peter Watson and Graham Sutherland, at a gathering in his Cromwell Place studio near the Royal College of Art. They liked each other – sharing a party spirit. John would recall a Turkish carpet covered in paint, and the famous Bacon toast as glasses were filled and refilled: ‘Champagne for my real friends: real pain for my sham friends.’ Lucian was more tied to London. He had a new obsession, having taken up with Kitty Epstein – Lorna’s 20-year-old niece. Was it revenge? An impression of her fragility has been immortalised in several marvellous Freud portraits, the best being Girl with a Kitten. Huge eyes and hair seem to have been imprinted on a frightened egg. Avoiding our gaze, Kitty grips the neck of a sullen kitten that looks straight at us before being fondled or throttled. In turn, the invisible hands of the artist seem to be tightening around the woman’s throat. The animal lover also has an ambiguous attitude to the cat. As John wrote to E.Q., ‘Lucian now has two sparrow hawks (alive) in his studio. local kittens Im sorry to say are purloined to satisfy their cruel cravings all colors no bar…’.9 London remained crucial to John for family, friends and useful contacts. Lilian Somerville, the British Council’s new head of fine arts, ensured that his work toured widely. In 1948 it would be prominent in mixed shows in France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland. There were also to be British Council, Arts Council and Government Art Collection purchases. Restrictions worsened still further in September, with less meat and butter and petrol withdrawn altogether. And from 1 October for three months of crisis no currency could be taken overseas, trapping beleaguered Britons at home. As usual, John Craxton broke free in the nick of time. Once restored, the £100 limit would not be lifted until 1959.

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RAVISHER OF EYES

At the end of September 1947 John presented himself with a 25th birthday gift, by arranging a first visit to Crete. He had three aims for the trip: to explore the palace of King Minos, find the birthplace of El Greco and meet up again with a dancing butcher now demobbed from the navy. Like a giant cormorant swimming in the Eastern Mediterranean, Crete stretches long and thin for 250 kilometres, with a broken spine of mountains and scenery hailed by one Homer translator as ‘a ravisher of eyes’. Edging the Aegean Sea, and almost equidistant from Europe, Asia and Africa, this Levantine land is flanked by the Libyan promontory to the south and connected by chains of smaller islands to the Greek and Turkish mainlands. East of Sofia, it is more southerly than Algiers and Tunis. But despite strategic placement for traders and invaders, a union with Greece as late as 1913 and a recently revived history of brutal occupation, the Crete that John Craxton discovered was essentially a world within itself. Here the unending challenge was to live amid unyielding beauty. Procuring a passage on a Swedish cruise ship, John enjoyed a festive voyage. He wrote to his parents about an ‘international drinking party’ involving a crew of ‘two Poles, three Swedes, two English, one Dutchman and a Spanish boy of 17 who escaped from Spain and stowed away in the hold of the ship, something was wrong fortunately with the freezing systems & he was discovered, but pretty frappe already’. All were relieved to arrive in a Crete, ‘where its still August & hot. The grape harvest is nearly over and the oranges are getting ripe…’. Landing in Herakleion, the past and future capital of Crete and its ongoing commercial centre, John found a city whose Venetian walls had withstood a 21-year siege before falling to the Turks in 1669. The colonists from Venice had been allowed to leave with any portable thing, and in 1946 much of what remained was an Ottoman centre whose own history had stopped abruptly with the Muslim expulsions soon after John’s birth. What German bombers spared, Greek demolition squads would largely destroy, as a city of old wealth and new Hellenic nationalism carried on the pursuit of ages in wrecking and rebuilding itself. John surveyed the blitzed shells of the Venetian basilica and loggia (both later to be brilliantly reconstructed) and the unscathed former mosque turned Orthodox cathedral. The emptied modernist structure of the Archaeological Museum was smashed and shut – blast damage having

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ended German plans for a chemical warfare centre and ballet hall. A new arrival got his bearings via the surviving Morosini Fountain, where water still roared from the mouths of St Mark’s stone lions. He then turned south and into 1866 Street. A dinful bustle ran between lines of open-air stalls. Meat was arrayed on marble slabs and carcasses hung from iron hooks behind chopping tables in a timeless scene bloodshot with the crimson aprons of the butchers. First John breakfasted in a market taverna on tripe soup and local wine. (‘After two or three tumblers of Cretan malmsey, I knew that for me retsina would soon be a wine of the past.’1) Then he found his friend swishing flies from hunks of flesh with a bull’s tail. The dancing butcher removed his apron for an embrace, and they arranged to meet again later. With no place to stay, the visitor had a nearby mansion in mind. So he caught a bus at the ramparts for a 15-minute ride through scratchy farms to a humdrum village called Knossos. He walked up a curving drive and through the ruins of an Edwardian English garden still traceable below unkempt palms and pines. A headless statue of Hadrian guarded the entrance to the Villa Ariadne – then lately returned to British School at Athens archaeologists after military use. The new curator, Piet de Jong, a Yorkshire man born to Dutch parents, was there with his wife, Effie. He let John stay for a few nights in a domestic interior of grandeur and squalor. Most of the original imported furniture had been damaged or pillaged; a library had been largely burned. At least the lodger could take a cold bath to wash off gritty dust blowing in from the Sahara, if not the filth of recent history now in the very fabric of the building. Then he had a siesta on an abandoned army bed. Built for archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in 1906, the house was named after the mythological daughter of King Minos – who enabled her lover Theseus to escape from the labyrinth by rewinding a ball of thread after killing the monstrous Minotaur. Evans had bought the land at Knossos linked to the legend and, over a handful of digging seasons from 1900, uncovered an ancient palatial building of such complexity that he could claim to have discovered the epicentre of Minoan culture and the inspiration for the labyrinth. Then a palace of his own rose above the heart of a Minoan metropolis housing 30,000 people at its 1450 BC peak. Here, fortified by Fortnum & Mason food hampers, French wines and lemonade cooled with Cretan mountain snow, he reimagined the splendour of Knossos. His bath, an iron sarcophagus on huge feet cast and enamelled by Rufford & Co. of Stourbridge, and fuelled by the first water heater on Crete, was a pool for deep reflection. By the time John lay in it the tub was a rare remaining fitting from the Evans era, though the heater had given up the battle. The Villa Ariadne had been a male preserve in the reign of Sir Arthur Evans, who publicly upheld Victorian rules of propriety while a closeted homosexual. A lodge named the Taverna had been built beside the road for female guests in the 1920s. Although the Evans legend was still strong when John arrived, it had been eclipsed by that of warrior-scholar John Pendlebury

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Shepherds near Knossos, September 1947 Oil on canvas, 78 × 101 cm. Private collection

– Knossos curator in the 1930s and to the Cretans a modern Theseus since he had led resistance to the German invasion in May 1941, before being wounded, captured and summarily executed. Back in England Sir Arthur had died, aged 90, seven weeks later. John sunbathed on the terrace where Pendlebury had been snapped in fencing pose and Evans had photographed fabulous finds. Now a stuffy air had become more stifling, for the Villa Ariadne occupied a site whose archaeology dated from Neolithic to Nazi times. Having briefly housed the fleeing King of Greece, then a British field hospital, the villa became the residence of German commanders. General Kreipe had left from here on 26 April 1944, when kidnapped by a guerilla band led by Paddy and Billy Moss – driving his hijacked car through 22 checkpoints and then walking him over the mountains and across the island until removal by a British launch on 14 May. Kreipe’s brutal predecessor returned to wreak vengeance on the Cretans, and villa bedrooms, built half-underground and thickly shuttered for summer comfort, became torture chambers. In the garden, via a pergola now buckling under anaconda lengths of untended bougainvillea, John came upon a sinister sunken pool. It seemed designed for drowning rather than bathing. He peered into a pair of bunkers dug by Greek prisoners – along with an archaeological excavation beyond the villa grounds – while war raged. The occupiers who had seized and held Crete

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at such cost were so entrenched that their capitulation had been the last official act of the conflict in Europe. The document was completed in the Evans dining room at 10.30pm on 9 May 1945 – two days after General Alfred Jodl signed, at Reims in France, the surrender of German forces east and west. Escaping for some fresh air, John had the luxury of exploring the Palace of Knossos in solitude. The partly reconstructed remains of a 1,500-room building on four floors, with an inner sanctum for devotion to a snake goddess, was infested with snakes. Sparrows, swallows and peacocks nested among the concrete columns and frescoes recrafted into the 1920s while Cecil B. DeMille formed biblical cities in Hollywood backlots. Space enough remained for the imagination. As John recalled: In those days it was difficult to grasp the meaning of this strange and enigmatic place. Was it a shrine, a temple, a palace or a sanctuary? What esoteric rituals took place in it? Evans had named various parts of it ‘Throne Room’, ‘Lustral Basin’, ‘Theatral Area’, ‘Queen’s Quarters’. The names were not wholly convincing; they clearly had a deeper significance. I remember the delight of finding the main stairwell and being able to walk up and down like a Minoan three thousand years ago, sharing his feelings. It was a revelation.2 For John Craxton the point of Knossos was its humanism. The position near the sea, on a fertile plain and at a confluence of two streams, was chosen for economic reasons, but also for scenic beauty. Europe’s oldest civilisation had introduced an airy architecture of colonnades and courtyards, whose grace note was a pattern of large rooms divided and subdivided by walls of doors – for flexibility, ventilation and enjoyment of the view. Such openness was all the more remarkable since the site was undefended. John came to believe that Knossos was the temple to a goddess and that Minoan painters were female: I think it was run by women but guarded by men – having something of the arrangement of a beehive, with a queen bee at the centre. The myth of the place was all to do with Demeter and the return of the seasons and going into the underworld – a story then taken to the rest of Greece. The climate of Crete was designed to perpetuate the myth of immortality: green shoots appear in autumn and the most amazing flowers bloom in January. A month after John’s birth, Howard Carter had opened the tomb of Tutankhamun beside the Nile in the Valley of the Kings, and the ensuing haul of treasure relating to the mummified young pharaoh had caused an English craze for Ancient Egypt. King Tut influenced 1920s fashions and Art Deco designs from artefacts to architecture, and the hold on the popular

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Minoan seal ring from Archanes, Crete, c.1400–1375 BC Gold, 2.3 × 3.5 × 2.2 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

imagination has lasted – with the Egyptian Galleries still the busiest part of the British Museum. John was never impressed, seeing only stiff and fawning formality. He adored the athleticism and sensual freedom within a world of nature that was Minoan art. Vivid in red, black, blue and ochre, some restored frescoes had been rather freely reinterpreted for Arthur Evans by father-and-son Swiss painters the Émiles Gilliéron and Piet de Jong. But for John the most faithfully re-created image seemed to show the unlikeliest scene. While a male gymnast somersaulted over a bull, one female steadied the furious animal by holding its horns and another stood with arms outstretched to catch the leaper. Late on that first day he went with the demobbed sailor, Kostas, to The Rabbits, a taverna-cum-nightclub very near the Villa Ariadne. Kostas cooked pork chops from his butcher’s stall over a charcoal fire before an evening of eating, drinking, dancing and shooting: … painted cut-out tin rabbits that were placed strategically round the outer fence were riddled with bullet holes. Kosta, among others, shot a few of them as the evening progressed, as well as dancing his acrobatic dance – only a few yards from the palace of Knossos. After I left to sleep in the villa, the music and the shootings went on all night. In Crete in the years after the war, it was quite normal for every man to carry a gun and after a few tumblers of wine to suddenly go ‘bang, bang, bang’.3 Something went bang in John’s brain when poring over Knossos material in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. A Minoan gold seal-ring decorated with a bull-leaping scene bore an ‘amazing and uncanny’ likeness to the butcher’s dance with the upturned chair he had watched on Poros and Crete – and recorded in a painting. Now he knew that he had witnessed a folk survival over four millennia.

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Still on that introductory visit to Crete, he trekked to El Greco’s purported birthplace at Fodele near Herakleion. As he wrote to his parents: The bus put me down high up near the mountain village where the view was terrific. With me came a wild Cretan with a black beard & moustache, baggy trousers & a red sash. His children came up from the valley to fetch him on donkeys so I was asked if I would like to ride one… Down in the valley past the monastery the vast limestone crags & thick trees, oaks, pines, towered above us. We rode through a very narrow gorge, olives & ivy & springs bubbling out of caves & the sound of sheep bells up among the mountain trees, the little village is incredible & after getting a very mysterious & rather peering-out-of-the-window reception, I was taken in to the house of the President of the village who said I must make myself at home … That evening the male population of the village came to see what I was like in the taverna. I spent most of the time drawing their portraits … Next morning I went to find Greco’s house but its fallen down & just ivy clad ruins. Near by though half suffocated by lemon trees is a small & perfect little byzantine church with a few frescoes left, of saints but half crumbled away. The perfection of the little Byzantine church is what he kept from that visit as it fired his love for the painted churches of Crete. The story linking El Greco to Fodele was soon exposed as a modern myth. John came to believe that the master painter was born in Herakleion, after his family moved from western Crete. He thought that El Greco was baptised a Catholic, bringing a privileged life on Venetian-occupied Crete and a passport for later work in Italy and Spain. Meanwhile, John told Harold and Essie that he had entrusted a Cretan bag of goodies to a shipmate travelling on to London. ‘In it you will find a pot of honey from this little valley – the currants are from near here and the ants from the mountains’. Boxes of grapes would also await in the docked boat. He signed off with a blithe cue for parental heart attacks: I leave for the wildest part of Crete tomorrow where there are lots of terrible Communist cut throats. Since Im allways being taken for a Greek Communist myself perhaps I shall benefit – I find it better now never to understand Greek when Im approached d by the police. It works beautifully & they are completelyy at a loss. I just say with a broad smile English very good, me! No understand! Greco, English, together friends!

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Next minute I find myself in a café having a long talk in slang about how everyone says long live the king to be free themselves but deep down want to be rid of him. The Cretans are very independent people & everyone carries a loaded pistol & quite a few sharp knives but despite this apparent wildness they are incredibly kind & honest. Genteel Effie de Jong had warned that it would be madness to remain in the Cretan mountains after dark – bandits abounded and most men of those unruly parts were so brutish as to sleep with their boots on. John laughed and set off with a canvas bag filled with drawing paper and Conté pencils. Soon he was intoxicated – usually literally – by the generosity in mountain villages, no matter how poor they might be. He was bedazzled by the bright colours of woven fabrics and the fact that huge domestic storage pots were identical to the pithoi clay jars scattered across Knossos. Hospitality became all the more prodigious for a Greek-speaking friend of Paddy Leigh Fermor and Xan Fielding and for one sharing the first name of John Pendlebury. The village of Alones was greeted as a Cretan equivalent of Shoreham in Samuel Palmer’s Golden Valley of Kent. Xan had remarked on its poverty and resemblance to ‘a burst suitcase whose contents have been dropped in a puddle’.4 John found only enchantment – crediting the priest and patriarch, Father Yannis Alevizakis, a mighty resistance leader and raki drinker who addressed everyone, regardless of age, as ‘my child’ and ‘whose benign and civilised manner spread through the whole village so that everyone was good’. The visitor slept in a loft above the barn-like main room of the Alevizakis house – among stored apples, nuts and carobs – while his hosts occupied ledges below. In the morning the family was happy to be drawn, but it was hard not to be constantly eating since all households wanted to feed him. Then, wonder of wonders, Father Yannis was to preside at a wedding. The bride came from another village in a long cortège of festively decorated mules and donkeys, and on the way her companions drank and sang, with lyra, lute and pipe players part of the procession. John never forgot the spectacle – recalling 50 years later: The band was ensconced in a corner of one of the nicest rooms in the village, and I was one of the drinkers all around them. Then suddenly the best man burst through the double doors on his donkey to check that the bridegroom was still there. It was all wonderfully stylised. The donkey was covered in gorgeous embroidered coverlets. But the best man was so drunk that, as he came in, he took out his gun and fired – bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Someone shouted: ‘Don’t shoot the roof! The tiles come from Marseilles! They’re worth a lot of money!’ So they grabbed his arm and pulled him down, and as he fell he carried on firing – bullets went into the wall next to my head. There was plaster shooting out everywhere.

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So many people have been shot by accident in Crete, and not always by accident. If someone from another village stole your sheep or misused your sister you’d lie in wait behind a rock for days and days to kill him. I have three murderer friends in prison and quite a few people I loved dearly were shot. I have been to villages where there were very few old men because they had all been shot. When Paddy went back to Alones he was warned that the cousin of the boy he had accidentally killed was waiting in the woods to shoot him. Then a ‘dreadful gossip’ was told by the De Jongs in Knossos about a young English painter who had vanished into the mountains. Back in Athens the rumour-monger blurted at an embassy dinner: ‘How sad that young artist got shot in Crete.’ Sir Clifford Norton called the police. Having the time of his life, John evaded a search party – the people of Alones were used to hiding fugitive Britons. He eventually wired: ‘So sorry. I’ve been very high in the mountains.’ The ambassador probably missed the joke. Returning to Knossos, John thought of Daedalus – the architect of the labyrinth who had flown free from detention in his own creation on wings of wax and feathers, while his headstrong son Icarus had ignored paternal warnings and flown too near the melting sun. John Craxton, closer in nature to Icarus, ended his initial trip to Crete like Daedalus. He guided some bewildered US airmen through the labyrinthine ruins. They were most impressed by Minoan plumbing, and grateful enough to offer the guide a flight to Athens on borrowed wings.

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A spell cast by Crete was confirmed when John travelled to Izmir in Turkey. The sad air in this lost Greek city of Smyrna was summed up by Cretan Muslims still mourning their exile from 1923, and still struggling to learn Turkish. Unlike them, John could and would go back (to an island of sad Greek exiles from Smyrna). Most immediately, however, he had to revisit England for a late October opening of his exhibition with Lucian – the first commercial showcase for his Greek pictures. He was greeted by a postcard of a dog with the Freudian message: ‘Whooof whooof I scent a returned Crax!’1 The original London Gallery, co-owned by Lady Norton, had stood beside the similarly avant-garde Guggenheim Jeune in Cork Street in the late 1930s, until both succumbed to scant sales as well as approaching war. Most of the London Gallery’s stock had been destroyed in the Blitz, so in the revamped version underwritten by Peter Watson, and backed by Roland Penrose and bookseller Anton Zwemmer, E.L.T. Mesens could steer a strongly Surrealist course. The gallery opening at 23 Brook Street in Mayfair on Bonfire Night of 1946 burned money even faster than the original, since the managing director’s doctrinaire taste had fallen still further from fashion. The one painter on the books with popular appeal was John Craxton. Included at Peter’s insistence, he was a commercial necessity and an artistic anomaly. John was friendly with the London Gallery’s rakish assistant – bisexual Liverpudlian George Melly, whose complex relationship with Mr and Mrs Mesens had included sex sessions while on leave from the navy. The formidable Sybil Mesens, akin to a Vogue model when she had her clothes on, was a fashion buyer for Dickins & Jones department store. George was augmenting a low salary, and a passion for collecting Surrealist pictures, by moonlighting as a gay prostitute in a final fling before heterosexuality kicked in. He was also starting out as a jazz and blues singer – his startling performances owing less to vocal prowess than to irresistible exhibitionism as he belted out bawdy songs such as ‘Nuts’ and ‘I’ve Got Ford Engine Movements In My Hips’ in homage to Sophie Tucker and Bessie Smith. Dazed during his day job after all that had gone on the night before, George Melly was still able to recollect his thoughts for his rip-roaring Don’t Tell Sybil: An Intimate Memoir of E.L.T. Mesens. The private view of the 1947 Craxton and Freud exhibition, with 42 pictures between them, was recalled as ‘the only grand vernissage we ever had’. The gallery was packed with eminent admirers and potential buyers and a jeer-leader called Douglas Cooper.

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Douglas Cooper was a collector, writer and curator of great wealth and girth. His exemplary taste in Cubism was fuelled by broad and deep malice. It took only one slip for a friend to be bitten with the venom deployed on many foes. This gross Picasso groupie was to be bested by John Richardson, who served as his lover, apprentice and nemesis since ending as the painter’s definitive biographer – though the magisterial story was still incomplete when he died, aged 95, in 2019. He had the best line on his former mentor, describing him in London as ‘a very large toad in a relatively small pool’.2 George Melly added: His face was round, and his mean, small eyes glinted behind thick spectacles. Although obviously overweight he didn’t seem flabby as much as taut, like a balloon. I had the feeling that, if pricked by a fork, he would have spurted like chicken Kiev, but bile instead of butter.3 At that October opening, a couple stood in front of one picture pondering a possible purchase. ‘It’s rubbish!’ hissed Douglas Cooper. Edouard banned him from the gallery – an order he ignored until George toad-marched him to the door. After that he was out to spit bile on Melly or Craxton at any opportunity. Edouard Mesens, an awkward mix of ruthless businessman and Dadaist prankster, saw John’s work as ‘butter but honest butter’ and both he and George were sometimes unable to conceal their contempt for its success compared with the Surrealist stock they loved. George Melly’s uncle had married into the Moores business family, and over lunch in a London hotel a young Pat Moores was invited by her father to go with George to choose a picture for under £100. Her cousin recalled: Pat eventually hesitated between two pictures: a beautiful drawing of a 1924 nude by Picasso or a lightweight if charming small oil of a sailor by Craxton. I tried to push her towards the Picasso … but she couldn’t make up her mind, so we took them both back to the hotel for her father to have the casting vote. It was clear he didn’t like either much, but predictably went for the Craxton. ‘There’s more work in that’, he argued, ‘and besides it’s in colour’.4 The joint show was a considerable success, as George also recollected with a disdainful tone: ‘Craxton painted fast and decoratively, and sometimes very big; Lucian worked slowly and often very small. Both sold out, but Craxton had a more profitable turnover.’5 There was not, in fact, any sort of sell-out. Afterwards John swapped Hotel by the Sea with Edouard for Lucian’s Petros portrait. The likeness remained a prized possession due to its ‘extraordinary intensity of feeling’. Hotel by the Sea was bought by the poet and art historian

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Phoebe Pool, whom John knew through Horizon, where ‘she was one of several women – Antonia White and Eudora Welty were others – always on the verge of destruction during the war and asking to be rescued from impending suicide’. Later Pool did indeed kill herself. By then the joyous painting had long since passed to Stephen Spender, who in 1957 sold it to the Tate – the first Craxton picture to enter the British national collection.6 Meanwhile autumn 1947 brought more good things. The debonair Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti, newly arrived in London and seeking a guided tour, found John Craxton. John tried to paint his portrait in a Claridge’s hotel bedroom ‘but there was too much going on’ – not least the brief affair that gave way to lasting friendship. The ongoing bond would also include Gian Carlo’s composer partner Samuel Barber. In November Horizon ran a dour Herbert Read feature on ‘The Fate of Modern Painting’ around zestful Craxton and Freud pictures. In December John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing reproduced three of John’s Greek works and two by Lucian. Although drained of colour, the images were enough to make those trapped in wintry Britain green with envy. Early in 1948 John underlined the message in a letter to Ben Nicholson: You must come to Greece one day of course one finds Bens all over the Parthenon especially where they have cut shallow round places for Doric columns in square blocks of marble (very white) … I hope to come back to London in April/May to make a new exhibition but I dread town life, this place spoils me & I suffer a million nerves when I have to face the proposition of no more mountain water or clear air, sea & my friends in the local taverna or this quiet house with no telephone or traffic outside.7 A lot was changing in London. Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson now left Horizon largely in the capable hands of Lys Lubbock and (still more) Sonia Brownell. That spring, after an eviction order, Lys found a new office at 53 Bedford Square, Bloomsbury. Peter provided fresh pictures and a large chandelier commissioned from Alberto Giacometti on a recent trip to Paris. Peter’s current interest was the Institute of Contemporary Arts, as founder – with the likes of Roland Penrose, Herbert Read and ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton – and funder. He also helped to curate a launch exhibition, 40 Years of Modern Art, in the Academy Cinema basement in Oxford Street. Works by Bacon, Craxton, Freud, Hepworth and Moore, alongside others by Arp, Giacometti, Gris, Klee, Magritte, Matisse, Mondrian, Miró and Picasso, were seen by 20,000 people. Less and less thrilled with contemporary art, and ever more disenchanted with life itself, Peter held firm to earlier passions. He now proposed a Horizon monograph

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on John Craxton, with a text by Geoffrey Grigson. It was a rare accolade for a 25-year-old artist – with costs underwritten, of course, by Peter Watson. John was required to remain at home for protracted periods to assist the production. A longing to be in Greece prompted a last note of angst as a thwarted social animal told the author: ‘Living today is more than an art: it’s a feat, and there are so few people one can talk to on a tightrope – let alone make love.’ 8 Ever a passionate collector, John briefly had money to spend – as Colin St John Wilson discovered. The future designer of the British Library was at this point an architectural student and fledgling art buyer. Two years earlier he had bought, from Roland, Browse & Delbanco, a £15 study for Sutherland’s Gorse on Sea Wall. Another sketchbook sheet was found framed beneath it, so he sold the bonus work to fund trips to Paris and Italy. Now, broke again, he was returning the gorse drawing to the Cork Street gallery. Henry Roland offered a £15 refund: I demurred, bumbled and hovered around trying to make up my mind. As I did so a tall stranger muttered in my ear ‘I’ll give you seventy quid for it out in the street’. Mr Roland must have sensed that something was going on and he came up to me with bulging eyes and announced ‘£15 now or never – make up your mind’. I thought it was a pretty mean line to take with a poor student, but I needed the cash and I did not know who the tall stranger was, and so I made the deal with Roland. The stranger then introduced himself as John Craxton and I went home cursing my lack of gambling spirit.9 In June 1948, 112 years after the visit of Eugène Delacroix, John got himself to Algiers. Delacroix had been part of a diplomatic mission to the new French colony, and John arrived after the violent suppression of protests that would eventually lead to Algeria’s brutal war of independence. As usual, he was blind to politics and economics. Like Delacroix, whose journals he loved, he was transfixed by the brilliance of North African life, light and colour. It failed to register in his art, as it had for Matisse and Klee, because his heart was already lost to Greece. He wrote to Janet, now studying at the Paris Conservatoire: ‘Algiers is wonderfull and more than that I spend my waking dreams in the Kasbah.’ In July Peter wrote to say the delayed Grigson text had been promised for the following week but its delivery was doubted. Another letter came from Venice in August, in which he described seeing the ‘cleaned and sparkling’ Byzantine mosaics in St Mark’s as one of the great experiences of his life. And then: Now the news about your book is not so good. I tried my best by telephone letters etc to get Geoffrey Grigson to send in his list & photos before I left

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but he would not. However, Sonia writes, ‘the article has come in and it’s really considerably on the embarrassing side. The awful selfconsciousness of the habitual attacker trying to praise.’ This doesn’t sound so good I fear but until I see the proofs I have no idea what G.G. has been up to. Anyway I can hardly refuse it having asked him to do it … Apparently Sonia called in Lucian to help with the photos & lists which were in a muddle and he has been a great help in putting it all together. By mid-September Peter was writing to remind John of the cable he had sent for a final decision on the title before the book went to print. John itched to be away again – and this time on the track of his favourite painter. As he wrote to the Mastropetros family in November: Thank you very much for your letter which was full of news and made me very unhappy that I am still in dirty London and more than that I was in England all the summer when I should have been in the sea at Poros and feeling well and painting a great number of pictures … I was so unhappy all the summer with no money in the bank. I was stuck in London. Now I am £120 overdrawn to my bank so things look very dark. I went to Spain for a month with a friend [probably the American art historian Anthony M. Clark, who had written to John after seeing his pictures in Horizon] during October in order to see the paintings of El Greco. They were the most wonderfull pictures I have ever seen, especially those in Toledo. All my life I have wanted to see his paintings and so when I was asked if I would like to go I said yes very quick. After having been in Greece it was impossible to like Spain and the people there. There there is real fascism and no freedom no one is like the Greek in spirit. The rich are very snobbish and the poor are very naïve. The priests are very fat and well-fed and they sell small plots of land in heaven – for a lot of money – for those simple people who want to be sure of having a place to build on when they go there!! The letter, following a leisurely tour of Madrid, Toledo, Seville and Granada, was illustrated with a drawing of ‘Spanish Torture’. It showed a man being stretched on the rack. A new sufferer from Greek homesickness saw himself in the tormented image. Having debunked one El Greco myth in Crete, he now did the same in Spain: Once again, an attempt was made to delude the pilgrims into accepting a house called ‘Casa del Greco’ as his. It had nothing to do with him. By then I had done some homework; the truth is that he lived in the

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nearby magnificent palace of the Marquis de Villena, begun in the 14th century by Samuel Levi, a prosperous Jew, who was treasurer to Peter the Cruel. Greco rented at least 24 rooms here, including a grand audience hall, and a splendid two-tiered colonnaded courtyard. After Greco’s death, alas, this marvellous palace was allowed to fall into disrepair and was finally demolished early in the 20th century … No building now stands where Greco lived and painted; even his tomb … and that of his son, have been ruthlessly swept away.10 The Horizon book John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings – no better title had been provided – finally came off the presses in December, too late for Christmas sales. Peter wrote that it was ‘all Grigson’s fault’. While retaining a friendship with the writer, John’s dislike of art criticism hardened after reading the text, and he vetoed any further book apart from exhibition catalogues. One approach was rebuffed with the words: ‘I refuse to let my carefully orchestrated pictures play second fiddle to your art theories.’ His annotations in the margins of art books were witty and deadly. ‘But why explain pictures?’ he once asked. ‘No meal can be made more exciting by a running commentary analysis of the flavours. Everyone has a different tongue. Pictures need no literary introduction. What they always need are open eyes and minds.’ He wanted his art to speak for itself, as it effectively did in the Grigson volume. Thirty-six images amounted to a seven-year survey and ran from the shadowy melancholy of Poet in Landscape to the sunburst tribute to Greece, Pastoral for P.W. Painted on the largest canvas he could find, the composition was ‘a gesture against confined space’11 and an expansive joke to honour a patron in whose flat there was hardly room to swing a mouse. This was the last of John’s emblematic self-portraits – he had just taught himself to play the flute. The goatherd serenading a mountain flock in a sonorous grid of rectangles and triangles, playing a traditional pipe cut from a calamus reed and holed with a red-hot nail, further refers to Orpheus and Pan. The piper is also Peter Watson, as is the goat on the right. Always influenced by music, and listening to Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements when working on this picture, John thought of Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Each animal would represent an unnamed friend. Lucian was one, E.Q. Nicholson another. The most prominent goat, with leg extended like a regal arm at an embassy cocktail party, was Lady Norton. She, too, was a keen rock-climber. Completed in London during another bout of pleurisy, the painting was a gesture of beckoning for the artist himself. When barely returned from Spain, he left again for Greece. On Poros there was a happy meeting with the Greek-American poet and translator Kimon Friar and guidance over ‘the landscapes of literature & poetry’. Then, in October, ‘to prolong the summer’ and savour his birthday, John headed south. As he wrote on

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Pastoral for P.W., 1948 Oil on canvas, 204.5 × 262.5 cm. Tate

a postcard to E.Q. – with no punctuation and spelling more than usually awry in his haste and excitement: Im 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…12 The island paradise was Crete.

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GOING NATIVE

For his second visit to Crete John aimed to find resistance comrades of Paddy and Xan, and so to fall in with the untamed vigour of mountain life. An Athenian friend warned that such a misadventure would end in murder. This was the year when 20,000 leftist detainees laboured on Makronisos off Attica, and there were other prison islands too. At the Civil War climax, bloody reigns of White or Red terror erupted over the body of Greece like blossoms of the Judas tree. Beyond such oppression and repression, Crete was widely reckoned another word for Anarchy. Danger was never a barrier to John Craxton. He was far less aware of it than his American friend Kevin Andrews, whose sojourns in the war-ravaged Peloponnese at this time to survey historic fortresses would be recorded in the hair-raising book The Flight of Ikaros. It was a prophetic title for a philhellenic man of action who eventually drowned, in his sixties, while swimming between Kythira and Avgo, one reputed birthplace of Aphrodite. John was luckier and too hedonistic to set himself tests of physical endurance beyond enduring pleasure. But he had a strong constitution and stronger will. Already tasting matchless Cretan hospitality, he was also immune to propaganda. Staunchly loyal to the legacy of homegrown statesman Eleftherios Venizelos, Crete had formed a united front against the Germans, and isolated elements could not be purged by Communist fighters as readily as elsewhere in Greece. Plus, truces had been painstakingly brokered. Civil War hostilities and atrocities did occur; a few leftist rebels held out into the 1960s, with the last amnestied in 1975. But some Civil War clashes were a cover for clan vendetta – that Cretan speciality. Strangers were safe even if neighbours were not. Now, landing at Herakleion, John caught a bus to Argyroupolis, where the road ended. Any Cretan bus journey at that time was unlikely to be straightforward. There were delayed starts while bleating livestock was strapped to the roof and more people and trussed chickens crammed inside, then unscheduled stops for engine cooling, boulder clearing and passenger hysterics. Argyroupolis was the nearest stop for Asi Gonia – a mountain village at the top of a ravine, in the Mouselas valley, and still a long walk away. Here and all over Crete, what looked at first like unbroken wilderness gradually revealed itself as inhabited landscape: the rural soundtrack was rife with sheep and goat bells, and the cries and whistles of herders. The roughest terrain was criss-crossed with paths worn by hooves and feet and

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Jacket for The Cretan Runner by George Psychoundakis

connecting the smallest hamlets. Resting points lay in caves and stone cheese-making shelters or with the gregarious company in any sheepfold. Asi Gonia had defied Ottomans and Germans but welcomed non-invaders – especially on St George’s Day, 23 April, for the blessing of sheep flocks and the toasting of shepherds. John was doggedly engaged drawing and drinking here. The Asi Gonian he most wanted to meet had been born among its poorest and remained most elusive. Raised in a one-room hovel, George Psychoundakis had tended his family’s few sheep and goats after minimal schooling. He mapped the rural landscape in his head – to great effect when he became Paddy’s chief courier and guide. This small, wiry figure performed epic feats with the persona of a Greek Groucho Marx. In 490 BC Pheidippides ran 42 kilometres from the Battle of Marathon to tell Athens of the Greek victory over the Persians, then died of exhaustion. Paddy’s aide crossed Crete from Kissamos to Paleochora one night – exceeding the legendary deed and living to tell the tale. George weathered extremes of heat, cold, hunger and injustice. Despite combat honours from Britain, he had been jailed as a deserter after the occupation. His livestock was stolen and now he had been conscripted into the Civil War. John would meet him on a later visit to Asi Gonia, when he was working as a charcoal burner – having lived in a cave – and still writing. When Paddy heard of his fate, and read the manuscript of war service written in prison, he translated and secured publication in 1955 of what became The Cretan Runner. John Craxton designed a cover for a later edition, by which time the artist and author were friends. While burning charcoal, George had plotted a book about the anthropology of Asi Gonia to be called The Eagle’s Nest. Later he translated Homer’s Odyssey from Ancient Greek into Cretan dialect on the pattern of the Erotokritos – a seventeenth-century romantic and patriotic saga recounted over 10,000 lines of rhyming 15-syllable couplets that his illiterate father recited by heart. Then he turned to the Iliad before ending

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his literary career in a dialogue with Charon, in Greek tradition both the ferryman over the River Styx and Death. Having missed George that trip, John returned to Alones for a gleeful reunion. Now he slept with the shepherds of the village in their sheepfolds, where they were always primed for a party. John loved their timeless independence and vigilance in a life of sun-hours – of bell-following, counting, milking, cheese-making, guarding against eagles and thieves, and cherishing talk, song and laughter against an elemental silence: ‘The shepherds were wonderful – swarthy, bearded, very funny, slightly mad. Lots of badinage. Like the Irish, they loved blarney – funny, phoney stories and lots of leg-pulling. They couldn’t bear seriousness.’ He left to paint two tributes: Homage to Alones and Shepherds at Night. In both pictures a pair of foreground shepherds wears the hooded cape of the Cretan highlander woven from sheep and goats’ wool and doubling as a sleeping bag. Moonlit or firelit, the two wrapped men resemble monks or ghosts. Each eerily illuminated pairing – eyes flashing with the fire of life – is joined by a shadowy figure in the background. One tethers a goat while the other – perhaps the artist himself – runs in wild abandon, probably warmed by raki and apparently leaping for joy. Now, wherever he might be, John planned an annual break out in the Cretan mountains, needing to flee the confines of his studio and urban sophistication still more. He had deliberately sought out a country with no great tradition of modern art but a focus on life itself. As he said: I can work best in an atmosphere where life is considered more important than art – where life itself is an Art. Then I find it’s possible to feel a real person – real people, real elements, real windows – real sun above all. In a life of reality my imagination really works. I feel like an émigré in London and squashed FLAT.1 Every real thing he loved about Greece he loved most of all in Crete, and from his first visit the island provided much of the dash and drama within his exultant pictures. Never afraid to knock on an unknown door, John was welcomed wherever he went. He might bed down on a living-room ledge – snug on a ‘mattress’ of springy thorn branches below goat’s wool rugs, and covered by a shepherd’s cloak – while poultry and donkeys shared the floor. Often, he took rugs and blankets on to the roof to sleep under the stars. For all the hardship, on Crete he found that the art of living next to nature had attained an earthy majesty due in large part to the olive and vine. A few olive trees – the birthright of every Cretan – provided fuel, food and oil for soap, light and cooking. And each household had a unique line in wine: ‘Every family made its own wine in earthenware barrels. Once a year they were cleaned out with boiling water and different mixtures of herbs which left a slight and always distinctive flavour.’ Skins of trodden grapes were

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Shepherds at Night, 1949 Oil on canvas, 76 × 101.5 cm. Private collection

used to make raki and winter sweets – nothing was wasted. Olive trees supplied one of the world’s healthiest diets. Meat was a luxury; a rooster might be killed in a guest’s honour, but daily staples were bread, nuts, macaroni, vegetables, fruit, pulses, eggs, goat’s milk and cheese and sheep’s yoghurt carved from near-solid white blocks. Snails, herbs and wild greens were gathered from the hillsides along with brushwood for bread-ovens. Cretan men looked resplendent in formal attire of high leather boots, with breeches, folded cummerbunds, black shirts, woven waistcoats, jackets and cloaks with bright silk linings, and fringed headscarves tied in a particular way according to village of origin. Even at their most casual they were armed to the teeth, in which they might be pressing gently on a scented flower. The male fraternity enjoyed leisurely conversation while the women, shrouded in brown or black, worked as they chatted: a distaff under one elbow, twisting thread from a cloud of snowy wool; nimble fingers making embroidery and lace; bodies bent over weaving looms or field labour. John loved the domestic industry of silk production. First, mulberry-fattened white cocoons were parboiled in a tub until turning yellow. Then the stew was whisked with a stick, gathering loose strands into a single thread to be looped round a treadle-operated wheel. Cocoons turned transparent as they unravelled,

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until the dead worms were stripped and fed to chickens. The artist took a particular interest in the dyeing process for all the Cretan fabrics, with natural materials exploited for an explosion of brilliant colours. John was ill on Poros in 1950, taking penicillin for a throat infection, when Lady Norton invited him to cruise around Crete on a chartered caique. He felt worse and worse in a social gathering, yearning to be free to draw and paint and wander. They landed at Chania. Unreconstructed since the heavy German bombing of 1941, the city on a plain of citrus and olive groves was still rich in the grandeur of its history. In a taverna in Kastelli – centre of the Minoan city – Lady Norton declined to buy a female torso from the fourth century BC, lately dug up by a labourer. ‘If it had been by Arp she would have leapt at it’, John said. Then word got out who she was, and delegations and petitions ensued. The caique sailed on – to Rethymno, Herakleion, Sitia – with John travelling by bus where possible to meet the party at the next port of call. Finally, when they moored on the south-west coast at Chora Sfakion, capital of Sfakia province, he could bear it no longer and broke away. Lady Norton sailed away with her society friends, but left him with some money. Badly bombed and littered with British helmets, ration tins and sundry war debris, a town cut by revolt and reprisal to a small village was largely deserted since shepherd families had taken flocks for summer grazing in the hills. It was very hot and ‘wonderfully like living in a permanent siesta’. Fed by a fisherman’s wife on sheep’s milk and fresh fish, the convalescent slowly recovered. He slept on the floor of a police station by the sea, a guest of bored conscripts from army service brought in from other parts of Greece to garrison Crete’s most lawless corner. The police station bristled with machine-guns and hand-grenades, all set for a siege, but the guards were not confined to their barbican barracks. In the evenings they took John in their patrol boat for picnics on a secluded beach, where they bathed and partied. They told stories, sang ribald songs and had weight-lifting contests. One naked officer marched up and down the strand singing a bandit anthem he had learned from a prisoner and taken to heart. The drafted company relaxed into natural high spirits in a location free from snipers, while being aware that recalcitrant Sfakians were always more liable to be shooting at one another. The biggest danger they faced together, back at base, was the daily forage for a breakfast of prickly pears. In a coffee-house John met Reg Butler – a Londoner who had lost a lung to tuberculosis and left the Tax Office to satisfy a roving spirit. He had bicycled across Europe and now was concluding a nine-month back-packing trip through North Africa and the Middle East with a peregrination on Crete. He wanted to walk through the Samaria Gorge and over the Omalos Plain to Chania – John’s plan too. So two loners joined forces to travel with sketchbook and notebook. Reg had been subsisting on £5 a week earned from pot-boiler stories written en route and mailed to romantic magazines. His adventures would be wittily recorded in a 1953 book, At Large In The Sun.

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The policemen begged them to change their minds. (‘They’re all Communists in Samaria – bandits – sheep-thieves – murderers!’) The chief officer – the naked singer of the bandit song on the beach – banned them from leaving since their slaughter would gravely embarrass him. John, fluent by now in the mores of rural Greece, had no qualms. A shepherd in the coffee-shop offered to take them to his home village of Muri, where a fast was to be broken with a feast. John fibbed to the police chief that they would go no further. So they loaded their things on to a pack-mule for the hard climb ahead, while their companion carried a rifle. He had a blood feud in full swing. In Muri there were the usual sounds of dogs barking, cockerels crowing and an amazing din like clogged machinery struggling and failing to crank into action – the noise of a single donkey braying – multiplied many times. But now families camping in war-wrecked houses, with ancestral photos hanging in roofless rooms, were in festive mood. John drew the labours of a butcher, who contrived to talk with a dagger between his teeth as he worked at a sheep’s carcass: With blood-stained apron and five-day growth of stubble, he looked like one just arrived from the latest massacre. ‘Oh you lucky creature!’ he addressed the head which John was drawing. ‘It’s not every sheep that has the good luck of having its throat cut, and then having its picture taken to London!’2 At the next mountain village John and Reg caught the buzz of a honey harvest. Buckets of honeycomb, pursued by squadrons of bees, were lugged from hives in the olive groves for girls to squeeze through a wicker basket set on a tin bath. They paused from their task to wage sticky-handed fights with passing lads. The visitors stayed with the village president – a gargantuan figure who, during their shared supper, gnawed clean a calf’s jawbone while using honey like mustard. ‘Then he heaved the jawbone casually through the window, wiped his dagger on a piece of bread and thrust it back into its sheath with a huge swing of his massive arm’, Reg reported. Hearing that Reg knew German, a lean Sfakian in neatly pressed trousers rather than the usual breeches, and with a rifle over his knees, asked for a letter to be written to a former German soldier who had endeared himself to villagers with his kindness to children. Reg and John were then invited to a three-day festival in the letter dictator’s home village: Samaria. He was from the Viglis family, notorious across Crete as bandits and Communists, with 15 kinsmen currently hunted as outlaws. He had just served two years on the prison island of Macronisos. During a decade of conflict no priest could be persuaded to walk up the gorge to conduct services; at last they had managed to nab one. After climbing the narrow base of one of Europe’s longest and deepest gorges for most of the day, the painter, the writer, the jailbird and the priest

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A Cretan Priest, 28 October 1948 Conté pencil on paper, 58.4 × 40.6 cm. Private collection

reached Samaria in late afternoon. Ever oppressed by overhanging crags, the village in the ravine had been reduced to five houses and four tiny churches – the rest of the dwellings burned down as punishment for sheltering Communists. The remaining diehards appeared unmoveable – but all would be relocated when the Samaria National Park was set up in 1962. Now that they had finally got him, the priest was to lead three chapel festivities on successive days. John said: It was so cut off, hardly anyone had ever been there. Each house had its own cheese – some like gruyère, others like Pont-l’Évêque. We ate stuffed courgettes and delicious vlita spinach and a meat with a rare and succulent delicacy. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Don’t ask!’ the head man answered. It was wild agrimi goat – the rarest of all animals in the Mediterranean.’ Three agrimi had been killed for the three-day festival. Small fare, they said: a Selino valley hunter had bagged 42 the previous year with a Bren gun. John

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was not the kind of traveller who always knows best, but from then on he did all he could to plead the cause of the Cretan wild goat – actually introduced to the island in Minoan times but believed to have suckled Zeus in a cave on Mount Ida. The visitors slept on the roof of the village president’s house – ‘in September it was still like a frying pan’ – and then went down to swim in the bay of Agia Roumeli, where a cool freshwater spring bubbled into the sea. Above the beach, the chapel of St Paul marked the spot where the saint baptised Crete’s first Christian converts. John deduced that it had been built over a temple to Apollo. ‘A lot had been destroyed but the end was the original building all whitewashed. I did some archaeological research – scratching with my penknife and starting to uncover an incredible fresco.’ Back in Samaria, Byzantine saints with Cretan faces still shone out from seventeenth-century murals in a crammed candlelit church on a mountain slope shaded by cypress trees. John admired chandeliers lately beaten into shape from colourful tin still bearing the inscription ‘Wilson’s Pork Sausages – Packed in Brazil for U.S. Govt’. There was a chorus of protest every time the Englishmen tried to leave, until John said they really had to be going because he wanted to meet up with Manolis Paterakis – one of the Kreipe kidnappers – in his village of Koustogerako. ‘A family there has a vendetta with us’, the ex-prisoner cried. ‘When you get through the gorge to the Omalos Plain you’ll be shot on sight.’ The pair carried on blithely, but froze in alarm on a precipitous mountain path when pelted with stones by unseen beings above them. They pressed against the rockface for protection and waited; whenever they tried to advance, more pebbles rattled down like warning shots. Finally, they spied their assailants – with cloven hooves slipping on loose scree in a nervous reaction to any human movement. Further on the goats had scraped away all trace of the path. It was hard for two travellers to keep their nerve, balance and bearings: As we climbed onto the Omalos Plain and its incredible lunar landscape, there was a sudden put, put, put, put, put: tracer bullets going over our heads. I shouted ‘Stamata! Stamata! [Stop! Stop!] English!’ They couldn’t believe it; neither could we. They were a posse of soldiers firing into the air to pass the time. They invited us to join them in a ruined keep filled with straw. We got water from a well with things swimming in it. ‘What are they?’ I asked. ‘Live submarines – they won’t hurt you’, a soldier said. Guided by shepherds, they reached the village of Epanochori and nearly got no further. In a coffee-house a big man with a big moustache saw their notebook and sketchbook and said: ‘You’re spies! I’m having you arrested.’ His name was Eftykis Protopapadakis. A wall poster showed him on a recent trip to the United States, with an agrimi he had taken to President Truman as

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Manolis Paterakis by Joan Leigh Fermor

a present from the people of Crete. ‘He had hoped to stay in America, but they had kept the goat and sent him back’, John said. Pretending not to recognise the figure in the picture, he praised the giver of such a gift. ‘It was ME!’ said the big man, suddenly a big friend. He ordered a round of mulberry vodka – Crete’s most powerful drink – for strangers who were now his guests. On an evening stroll, John looked in a doorway and admired an embroidered rug. The man of the house asked if I’d like to have it. ‘Well, I’d like to buy it’, I said. ‘No, you can have it on condition you take my daughter.’ ‘That’s very kind but I couldn’t possibly’, I said. So he offered me a second rug, then went to a trunk and pulled out a whole pile. ‘You can have all of these if you take her.’ That dowry was all he had for a beautiful daughter. You couldn’t get rid of your daughters in Crete without a dowry. They set off late, lost their path and found themselves in a ravine. By the time they had clambered out, the moon had lit up the landscape but a great wind was hurtling down on them ‘like an express train’. Around 2am they sought shelter by knocking on the door of a small farmhouse. ‘Please help us’, John shouted. ‘We are Englishmen and we have lost our way.’ The voice of an elderly woman answered: ‘Wait a minute while I put some clothes on.’ She fried some eggs and served the most delicious Sauterne-like wine John had ever tasted. With daylight, they walked on to Koustogerako where they found Manolis Paterakis and joined a wedding party of 500 people from the surrounding countryside. It lasted four days and nights.

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The bride and groom were next-door neighbours. Seven years earlier they were among the children and women of the village who – since the men had all gone into hiding – were lined up in front of a German machine-gun. Watching from a crag as the massacre of their families was about to unfold, partisans opened fire on the execution squad and women and children ran for their lives. Kostis Paterakis killed the commanding officer with his first shot. The Germans had gone back to burn and bomb the deserted village. The escapees had sheltered with relatives elsewhere, returning home to rebuild their houses only when Crete was freed. Manolis, who had lost a father and two brothers in the resistance struggle, had worked briefly in Athens as a British Embassy doorman after the war, thanks to Paddy Leigh Fermor, where John had first met him. Now he was the kindest, gentlest host – even while cradling the machine-gun he had refused to surrender and which he was set to unload into the night sky in honour of the newlyweds. By the time of his stay with the Paterakis family, John had staged further shows of Greek pictures with both the British Council in Athens and the London Gallery. Dozens of paintings and drawings demonstrated how the visual and visceral experience of travels in Greece had lodged in his soul – providing his subject matter for the rest of his life. He made more sales and new friends, but critical opinion was turning against him. The artist Wyndham Lewis likened the work to ‘a prettily tinted cocktail, that’s good but does not quite kick hard enough’.3 He was being branded a social gadfly who was clearly having too much fun. There was a bitter note from those excluded from the party as, back in blighted Britain, a dull new decade dawned.

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DAPHNIS AND CHLOË

Horizon magazine died with the 1940s – Cyril Connolly’s last editorial, in the December 1949 issue, reading like an epitaph: ‘It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.’ Others saw utopian possibilities with new-found conviction in the power of art, design and education to transform society. John Craxton’s private world of the imagination, and of sensory satisfaction, continued to open as he went his own merry way. By the end of 1950 both Penguin New Writing and the London Gallery had also expired. Asked about the future of British art, while opening a show of it in New York, Osbert Lancaster replied: ‘The Atom Bomb.’1 One bright note that May was the publication of Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food, with images of sun-baked plenty by John Minton based on Corsican motifs. Dreamy recipes with unobtainable ingredients tormented rationed readers, although olive oil was available in chemist shops for clearing earwax. Cash was tight, especially as the bank of Peter Watson was closing its doors even before London Gallery advances were axed. ‘I am sorry but I just must now start to be realistic about myself as I have been rather silly the last 2 years’, he wrote in perhaps the first rejection of a plea for help from his favourite protégé.2 But, in March 1950, he ensured that Craxton works were hung with Freuds and Bacons in the ICA show London–Paris: New Trends in Painting and Sculpture exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries. Eric Newton noted in the Sunday Times: ‘Certainly Picasso had a hand in shaping John Craxton’s Homage to Alones, but what matters is that it reflects an authentic experience.’ Peter used the London promotion to press for a Craxton show at Galerie Maeght in Paris, but selling contemporary British art in France was thought to be impossible just then. There was instead a solo exhibition at the Mayor Gallery in London’s Cork Street. Its main success was to rekindle the interest of Oliver Brown, whose Leicester Galleries held another show the following year. Around this time, the singer Peter Pears had a burst of acquisitive passion for the art – and, more fleetingly, for the artist too. The partner of composer Benjamin Britten practically papered his Aldeburgh bedroom with Craxton pictures plus the Poros portrait of the artist by Lucian Freud. He was a serious collector but while works by other hands were subsequently sold to assist music students (and the Freud likeness of John went, in 1961, to

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help fund the Aldeburgh Festival), the Craxtons were retained. Myfanwy Piper wrote: When I told John Craxton what a pleasure it was to find a nest of his paintings at the Red House he said that when he was young and broke Peter would go to his studio, look round and say, ‘Can I have that one?’ When he later referred to this life-saving generosity Peter replied, ‘Oh well you see I do a Messiah, and I don’t always want to, but then I buy a picture.3 John could also count on support from the Contemporary Art Society’s Robin Ironside, who bought works for public galleries in Harrogate and Rugby, as well as the Victoria and Albert Museum. Kenneth Clark passed on Craxton pictures of his own, via the CAS, to Southampton and Oldham. By autumn 1950 John was building on authentic experience for his involvement in grand plans for the Festival of Britain – designed, on the 1851 Great Exhibition centenary, to lift Britain out of post-war gloom. All the arts were to be harnessed for a national gala, with Harold Craxton on the advisory music panel. Projects spearheaded by the emergent Arts Council – another field of endeavour for Kenneth Clark – included a festive exhibition of large contemporary paintings. John was among the artists given free materials, and further galvanised into action by prizes of £500. He put together a series of drawings made during his most recent extended tour of Crete – culminating in the congregation of shepherds for the wedding party at Koustogerako – for the painting that would eventually become Four Figures in a Mountain Landscape. The picture was a career highlight, though the festival deadline proved fatal. While pretending to be still in England, to comply with the Arts Council commission, John returned to Poros. Herbert Read’s 1951 Contemporary British Art paperback survey for Pelican included an illustration of the British Council’s Craxton painting Galatas. Craxton and John Minton were claimed for a Graham Sutherland school of artists since they ‘paraphrased landscape very much in the same spirit’. John put a pencil line of approval next to one section: In the technical sense the plastic arts gain from the widest basis of experimentation and comparison, and for a painter to ignore the

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Four Figures in a Mountain Landscape, 1950 –1 Oil on canvas, 160 × 213.5 cm. Bristol City Art Gallery

discoveries of a Cézanne or a Picasso is equivalent to a scientist ignoring the discoveries of an Einstein or a Freud. But what is gained from seclusion, from intensive contemplation, and from obstinate independence is, objectively, an intensity of vision and, subjectively, a visionary intensity. Far from seclusion, he had now been virtually adopted by the Mastropetros family. They loved his warmth, liveliness and unspeakable ways with the Greek language (‘Mother, shall I get some more arse paper?’). There were lots of boating trips and beach picnics. John was very fond of Maria and her lithe figure was the inspiration for the girl waving a scarf who danced into his art from this time. He became closer still to Dino, the second eldest son and the most sensitive and reserved of them all. Dino was never to marry and his private life remained a mystery to his family. It is more than possible that he and John were lovers – and perhaps telling that the artist masked his true feelings by concentrating his portraits of the Mastropetros boys on Petros. Certainly their friendship was deep and lasted until Dino’s death. Into the New Year, John was working on his large Festival of Britain

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Girl on Seashore, 1948 Oil on canvas, 90 × 43.5 cm. ING UK Art Collection

painting of sun and shadow – in which four goatherds, two in light and two in darkness, lead a flock of goats from shelter in a mountain cave for milking at sunrise. Without further distraction he might have made it, but now Paddy turned up and took over Lucian’s old room. Paddy wrote at night; John painted in daylight: they were equally diverted by social life and one was forever dislodging the other from work. They were similarly capable of replenishing depleted funds by cashing in on charm. Both borrowed from Mastropetros family members who themselves badly needed a bailout. All in all, John was getting on none too productively when, back in London, Harold Craxton received a summons from the Royal Opera House. Alarm registered in every contorted sentence:

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12th January 1951 Dear Mr Craxton, If by chance you are in communication with your son, the point as far as we are concerned in relation to ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ is that I have just come back from America and in discussion here John Craxton’s name came up, and we were all inclined to the view that he was a very possible artist. It is naturally not possible for us to commit ourselves to a commission without discussion with him and seeing the kind of thing that he would have in mind, and this would naturally mean his coming back to London more or less forthwith. On the other hand we will quite understand if he feels that this is too much of an interruption of his work and perhaps a little too indefinite an offer to warrant his coming back all that way. The time is, of course, woefully short, and if we are not in direct contact with him by Monday then we shall reluctantly have to think again. Yours sincerely, Muriel M. Kerr, for Frederick Ashton PS I have great admiration for his work and shall always bear him in mind for something in the future if ‘Daphnis and Chloe’ is impossible. The first night of the new ballet was fewer than 12 weeks away. Since the letter revealing panic stations at Covent Garden was dictated and posted on a Friday, Harold – or, rather, Essie – had less than a weekend in which to contact a wanderer son. Frederick Ashton had not even found time to sign his cry for help. Luckily, Essie called Lady Norton after reading the letter on the Saturday morning. She sent a telegram to Poros, where it found its target. He boarded the next departing caique for a six-hour voyage to Piraeus, and then a bus for the onward journey to the British Embassy telephone. In that era of unmassed communications, the artist narrowly met the deadline for direct contact with the Sadlers Wells Ballet’s chief choreographer. It was a creative connection that changed the course of his life. But if John expected to call the tune when contacting Frederick Ashton as bidden, he was to be disappointed. Even in a fix, the maestro proved non-committal. While clear on wanting a décor designer familiar with modern Greek life, he hesitated when John proposed contemporary dress. Unsure whether to seize the challenge or run away, John called on an ailing friend. Turning on the

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radio to soothe the patient, he tuned in to Ravel’s ravishing score for Daphnis and Chloë. ‘The decision has been made by the gods’, he thought. ‘I am going back to London to chance it.’ The Longus drama of Ancient Greece, written around the second century AD, was first conceived as a ballet by Sergei Diaghilev. He commissioned music from Maurice Ravel for the Ballets Russes, and a near hour-long piece premiered in Paris in 1912 with choreography by Michel Fokine, lush décor by Léon Bakst, and lead dancers Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky. Even in a constellation of talent the romantic score outshone everyone and everything; thereafter it was known from concerts rather than staged productions. Reviving Daphnis and Chloë meant an immense challenge in matching sublime music with new steps and sets. The Ashton project was chiefly a vehicle for Margot Fonteyn, already the leading light in British ballet with a genius for portraying innocence, wonderment, joy and distress. He lunched with Karsavina in London and won her approval for a new version stressing the persistence of myth in modern Greece and playing to the Craxton credo. In the adapted three-act saga – a plot regarded by John as ‘Pompeiian Barbara Cartland’ – Daphnis and Chloë go with shepherds and shepherdesses to the sacred grove of Pan, where their love resists all temptation. Chloë is then abducted by pirates and rescued by Pan himself before the lovers are reunited in a final scene of rapture. Craxton sympathies really lay with the pirates who kidnapped Daphnis in the original story. For all his demands for modern dress, he gave them a swashbuckling look of 1820s sailors winning the Greek War of Independence. He also felt they had the virile characters of contemporary Cretan shepherds, some of whose marriages began with abductions – upholding an island tradition. In London John found the choreographer in bed with flu. He took pictures of Greek dancers to the sick room, where he also demonstrated some dances. The invalid was definitely intrigued – while instantly transforming the proffered portrait of a scarf-waving Maria Mastropetros into his moving vision of Margot. It helped that the two men got on well. They had already met, briefly during the war, and soon they were calling each other Freddie and Johnny. John learned that Kenneth Clark’s lover Mary Kessell, Oliver Messel and Pavel Tchelitchew had all been considered and rejected as the Daphnis and Chloë designer. Peter Watson worked with Freddie at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Graham Sutherland, designer of the 1941 Ashton ballet The Wanderer, may also have put in a word. Perhaps the crucial recommendation came from the ballet company’s pianist, Jean Gilbert. She had studied under Harold and lodged with the Craxtons. Even when the scenery was broadly agreed, and their friendship firmly established, Freddie hesitated to trust John with the costumes. Having grown up in South America, his passion for ballet had been fired by seeing Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan dance paeans to Greek antiquity that

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Two Greek Dancers, 1951 Oil on canvas, 66 × 56 cm. Britten Pears Arts, Aldeburgh

were then all the rage. For all the innovation of a dance pioneer, an old idea seemed to have stuck. In the British Museum he and John pondered vase-paintings of Ancient Greeks wearing long chiton tunics and argued the point. With time fast running out, the choreographer finally conceded. Having the men in shirts and trousers gave a clear contrast with the women and made for greater visual interest even if it risked claims of desecration by conservative critics. John said:

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Freddie was a very canny man. He had a brilliant theatrical sense while seeming to be a charming, rather frivolous old queen who liked getting tipsy on gin and tonic. He was a genius in many ways with a matchless gift for lyrical narrative. He was very helpful – open-eared. All the time I was working on the décor, he was doing the choreography so we had lots of discussions about work in progress, swapping ideas. But the reality of dismal old England brought a nasty shock: depressing, debilitating and chilling to the bone. As John wrote to Dino on 23 February: I have been continually in bed with flue and bad cold since I arrived also working at top speed on the ballet has made me feel awful. Every day rain fog and cold – the rainiest winter for 70 years and so damp. The ballet goes fairly well but it is a great undertaking. There are 3 scenes and 50 costumes and the workings of a large stage with all the complicated techniques of the theatre. I have had to give up the large picture for the Festival of Britain, I have not been in the cinema since I arrived, I feel like death… Clement Glock, head of the Covent Garden paint department, brought him back to life. Having worked with Piper, Sutherland, Salvador Dali and André Derain, she now presided over a Hampstead salon where John was soon welcomed. Clement liked artists to paint their own sets, to avoid a look of imitated style, and John gladly rose to the challenge – using enormous brushes and covering 18-metre lengths of canvas on winding machinery in Covent Garden’s paint room. He knew exactly the shade of blue to replicate an Aegean sky: it was the colour of the Gauloises cigarette packet he always carried with him. His drop curtain bore a head of Pan. Opening and closing scenes drew on Poros – the first depicting the Sleeping Maiden mountain range, the last a plain above glittering sea. The pirates’ craggy lair in the middle section was based on Crete. Ongoing problems with costumes were finally ended by the intervention of Margot Fonteyn. She and Freddie came to

Daphnis and Chloë Scene 1, 1951 Photograph and painting, 17 × 23 cm. A gift to the Mastropetros family. Private collection

Daphnis and Chloë Scene 2, 1951 Tempera on cardboard, 40.5 × 51 cm. Royal Opera House

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an early viewing, where they found John distraught that the head of the wardrobe department had ignored his wishes and imposed her vision of off-the-shoulder 1930s cocktail dresses. ‘I think John really wants something more like this’, said the lead dancer, bunching up the material to make a tight bodice and loose skirt. It was exactly what he wanted. The two conspirators repaired to a bar, an alliance secured. They shared a ruthless dedication to detail: John imagined all the colours of his costumes working like chords of music; he took the cap of the pirate chief to Greece, to ensure that it was dyed a precise shade of red. When Margot found her primrose-yellow costume wilting to grey in the dress rehearsal spotlight, she appropriated the pink outfit of a supporting dancer who might more properly fade into the background. In that seemingly endless English winter, another mournful missive was dispatched from Hampstead to Poros: My dear Dino and all of you as well. Thank you for your nice letter. I am so sorry not to have replied to it at once but of course I have been in bed with a bad cough. Can you imagine the climate here? Since I have been back not a single day of sun. Allways fog, yellow khaki grey colour thick and dirty now wind and cold rain allways the same grey damp sky… I work on the décor for Daphnis and Chloe and I have got the job I suppose because I must be one of the few people in London who know the Greek scene well. At any rate I am getting the costumes in contemporary clothes with Pan and the nymphs in archaic costume. The pirates will look like Hydriot seamen of 1821! Longing for light in an English gloom, John convinced the lighting director that two huge lamps in the wings would generate the radiance of Greece. The dramatic innovation landed the Royal Opera House with a stunning electricity bill. There was a further shock in store over the Craxton fee: advances had been begged while final terms remained unsettled. Kenneth Clark advised accepting nothing less than half the 1,000 guineas paid to Oliver Messel for Sleeping Beauty. When 300 guineas were eventually proposed, the designer threatened to leave, taking his designs with him. Another 200 guineas were then found. Money was needed more than ever because he had fallen for Margot, and she lived beyond a relatively meagre income even more than he did. He took her to The Colony Room, the louche Dean Street club run by Muriel Belcher, where Lucian and Francis Bacon were habitués. Muriel told the hat-check girl to relieve Margot of her mink coat but, as it was the only valuable thing she owned, she refused to part with it. So they had to leave. They went on to the Sugar Hill Club, in Duke Street, St James’s, where they could talk in peace – save for the live jazz urging them to jive and jitterbug. Understanding John’s aim for simplicity, Margot effectively designed all the clothes for the female dancers. He said: ‘Knowing a lot about costume, she turned the skirts round

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John, Margot and black cat, 1951 Ink on photograph. John Craxton Estate

underneath and pleated them outside and got this material that hung well and moved well. I would have been lost without her. I clung to her.’4 Born Peggy Hookham, three years before John, she had been devoted to ballet from the age of four. An iron dedication was reinforced by her mother, known as ‘Black Queen’ and still a controlling presence when John met her (when Margot was turning 32). Eventually, cortisone injections would keep the prima ballerina on her toes. All private pain had to be rendered invisible by the merciless discipline of an art whose paradox was to give Margot Fonteyn an unrivalled gift for conveying vulnerability and pathos. In Margot’s Long Acre flat, round the corner from the Royal Opera House, John found a portrait by Christopher Wood in a cupboard. It was an image of Constant Lambert, the alcoholic composer and head of music for the Sadlers Wells Ballet who, while mostly married to other people, was the love of Margot’s life. He introduced her to the Daphnis and Chloë score when she was 17, during their affair, and from that moment she had ‘wanted the ballet desperately’.5 John cleaned the portrait in the bath and hung it on the wall. The intimacy between the Daphnis and Chloë dancer and designer would be captured in a photograph snapped during a break in rehearsals. John inked in a stage set on the empty background and added a black cat for good luck.

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In the Fifty Restaurant in Charing Cross Road, John was allowed to make his own pizza – tomato, mozzarella and scampi – which they called Pizza Fonteyn. Food was a passion in both their lives, since there was never enough of it. Margot had returned from a triumphant American tour in the gifted mink coat, and now parcels of steak followed her across the Atlantic. Sir Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning – Olympic and military man of action – had steak and kidney pies sent from the Savoy Hotel. When the donor and his wife met them for a meal, John felt sexual energy in the air – suspecting that Lady Browning, better known as writer Daphne du Maurier, wanted to devour the dancer. As he said: She had the most marvellous natural figure – like a swimmer, which showed in her seamless dancing. She had the ability to wring your heart … As Chloe she was unbelievably heart-rending when the pirates tied her up and her dress was torn away. Michael Somes as Daphnis was all subtlety and submission. The scene stealer was pirate king Bryaxis, danced by New Zealander Alexander Grant, Freddie’s lover of the moment. With a long succession of leaps, lifts, twists and throws, he remembered the menacing role as ‘the most exhausting of my career, demanding tremendous elevation’.6 He was thrilled when, at the stage door, a fan blurted her surprise that he was so small. Wayne Sleep, who danced the part later, was smaller still. Both men recalled the trouble John took to give them the right look for the role – dark and demonic. Wayne had also concluded that the designer ‘would have made the perfect pirate king himself’.7 Freddie Ashton would later view Daphnis and Chloë as a career highlight; but, sensing a critical panning, he cabled John on the eve of the 5 April opening: ‘I fear we will be debagged’. The painter was anyway on edge since he had run out of time: side panels for the opening scene were plain blue. The pigment used on enormous expanses of canvas was mixed with size made from bones, so that, when the curtain rose on the first night, there was ‘a whiff like a box of bad codfish’. The thought that the same odour must have attended the unveiling of stage designs by Picasso and Matisse brought little consolation. But when the final curtain fell the cheering and clapping were almost enough to drown out the jeers of Douglas Cooper and John Richardson. The Daily Herald headline proved Freddie’s fearful prediction – ‘Flannel bags in maddest ballet’ – though the review applauded a production ‘packed like a thriller with excitement’. ‘FONTEYN DANCES WITHOUT DRESS’ stormed the Daily Express. Critic John Barber fumed: They [the sets] would adorn a snob shop-window. And to shoot the Greek spirit quite dead, the men wear shirts and slacks, the girls modern frocks. For a thrill, Margot loses hers and dances most of the time in her undies.

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The Times thought scenery and costumes ‘distinguished, pleasing and appropriate’ while the Sunday Times found ‘tubular trousers a poor substitute for the sunburned leg shod with sandal’. The Observer’s Richard Buckle, doyen of ballet critics, fired a bullet into a ‘noble endeavour … doomed for musical and dramatic reasons to partial failure from the start’. Damning Daphnis as a ‘sissy’, he also dismissed the décor: Ashton has had his designer create modern Greek peasant costumes, and has introduced in his choreography suggestions of chain dances and handkerchief dances which they perform today. Whether John Craxton was chosen so that his bleak formal style, with its fashionable mannerisms, derived from Sutherland and Picasso, should contrast with the shimmering impressionistic score or because he knows Greece and Greek dances, the second would seem the better reason. I believe that sensuous music should be matched by sensuous colour and design… The News Chronicle loved every aspect of the ballet – at least until noting: John Craxton’s décor is a delight to the eye. Many of his costumes also, especially the lovely white and silver of the nymphs. But Greek shepherds of the second century in trousers and their girls in beautifully pleated frocks? That will take some getting used to. How true. Daphnis and Chloë became a critical and popular success in retrospect – when the ballet world got used to it. That was generally the way with Ashton ballets. The turning point for this one came pretty quickly, when the production scored a big success in America and returned home with added lustre. After the 1951 premiere, Margot danced as Chloë in ten of the next 15 years. In 1955 Richard Buckle – by then a friend of John Craxton – published his book Modern Ballet Design. A frontispiece of four Daphnis and Chloë costume designs was followed by admiring comments.

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AEGEAN ADVENTURE

Backstage, after an early performance, Freddie, John and Margot drank champagne with two American visitors – dancer and choreographer Ruth Page and her wealthy lawyer husband Tom Hart Fisher. They were not so much drowning their sorrows over tepid reviews as looking to sunnier times. Steering the conversation to summer holidays, John announced that Margot longed for a Greek island cruise. Margot and Freddie feigned shock at such a brazen idea in front of generous Americans who had fêted the company on a recent visit to Chicago. But Tom Fisher’s diary and wallet were already open. When the party assembled in Athens, John had a further manoeuvre in mind. The Fishers had chartered a battered caique – the only available ‘yacht’ in Piraeus. The Eliki and its scratch crew had been made almost fit for purpose with the addition of a British Embassy steward, a Hotel Grand Bretagne cook and several cases of champagne and green chartreuse (reflecting what Freddie called his ‘tart’s taste in drinks’). John knew what was missing. In an open-air café he arranged an accidental meeting with Joan and Paddy, who, of course, charmed the caique charterers. As the couple were being waved off, Tom said on cue what fun it would be if they had been free to join the cruise. John then hared after his friends with news that they could come on board. Eliki set sail amid waves of laughter, reaching hilarity when it transpired that no one had a clue where they were heading. Guided by John and Paddy, the party then glided towards Poros. Within a day the cook had taken to his bunk with a fish bite and the captain was confessing to a loathing of the sea. Margot – drenched by a wave crashing through her cabin porthole, and sitting on an octopus while swimming – rose above every adversity. There was a happy meal at the Mastropetros house and a repayment of John and Paddy’s debts, probably with Joan’s money. They sailed on to the Ghika island of Hydra, to set in motion the holiday pattern of swimming, walking, church-visiting and feasting in quayside tavernas, before sleeping on the boat. In a cavernous space lined with wine barrels, they shared the late-night dancing of sponge-divers – one balancing backwards over a chair and another lifting a table with his teeth, while an octogenarian gyrated with a tumbler of water on his forehead. ‘Margot and Freddie joined in at once’, John said. ‘They danced amazingly well, picking up the steps so easily.’1 Freddie was ever watchful for work ideas. The spectacle of Margot swimming was playing in his mind – to resurface, seven years later, in his water-nymph ballet Ondine. The storm scene re-creates his feelings

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John and Paddy dancing on the beach, Serifos. Photograph by Joan Leigh Fermor, 1951

when Eliki plunged into an Aegean tempest and he was sure they were about to drown. Once again, Margot was fearless. Tacking between islands and mainland, they moored in the lovely Peloponnesian port of Nafplio, first capital of modern Greece. On Bourtzi island, where the Venetian fort had been converted into a hotel, they lay on the roof in swimsuits – Margot then stretching out naked for a siesta, with her feet taut in points position even in sleep. Paddy’s photographer friend Costas Achillopoulos arrived for an excursion to Epidaurus, where they tested the acoustics in the ancient theatre and posed for a group picture. For all the mishaps, the voyage was a runaway success. The artists on board were relaxing and absorbing every new experience by working in their own ways. John drew and painted; Paddy made notes for a travel feature to be illustrated with Joan’s photographs; Freddie led Margot through a rigorous regime of daily exercises with the ship’s railing a ballet barre. One morning the captain said a storm had blown the boat off course, so he had found shelter at the Cycladic island of Serifos, where an old friend could give him a guineafowl lunch. Cue more gales of laughter.

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left: John and Margot, Bourtzi Castle, Nafplio, by Costas Achillopoulos below: Cruise party at Bourtzi Castle by Joan Leigh Fermor opposite: Margot Fonteyn, Bourtzi Castle, by Joan Leigh Fermor Expedition to Epidaurus by Costas Achillopoulos Left to right: Tom Hart Fisher, Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor, John Craxton, Margot Fonteyn, Frederick Ashton, Ruth Page

Margot crossing Paros by John Craxton

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The abandoned party danced on the beach. Paddy told of Perseus and his mother drifting here after being thrown into the sea in a wooden chest, and of how the castaway had returned to turn a tyrant’s gang to stone with a wave of Medusa’s severed head. A shepherd took them to a chapel hewn in rock, and pointed to a slab in the floor below which, fathoms down, the head of the snake-haired Gorgon was said to be buried. On Sifnos they watched a colony of potters working at their wheels, and Margot and Freddie fell into each other’s arms in bliss when the boat was escorted towards Milos by dolphins. This was the home island of Michali, the handsome steward, who, hailed like a homecoming prince, took them to a banquet at his parents’ house. At an ancient theatre they declaimed and danced, before Michali led them through a landscape of scattered marble fragments – fluted pillars among the asphodels, a hero’s torso half embedded in a field – to a hollow under a fig tree where the Venus de Milo had lain for millennia. On the next island of Ios John took his friends to meet Angelos Koutsoupis, the maker of modern antiquities. At Santorini, most southerly of the Cyclades, they were shaken by a singularly stark terrain formed and reformed by landslide, earthquake and eruption. Volcanic explosions here, perhaps sinking the Minoan civilisation of Crete in a tsunami, were ongoing: the latest showering molten lava months before the Eliki party moored. Paddy noted: We were sailing across a submerged crater locked in a broken and gaptoothed circumference of lava. Black igneous rocks emerged in a smoking upheaval from the centre, and, as we dived overboard into water that was warm with subterranean fires, we had the sensation of swimming through the gates of hell.2 They transferred from boat to mules for the stepped ascent to a settlement clustered on a mountain crest, where they wandered in searing sunshine. John and Freddie napped on convent steps, sombreros over their faces. John sketched in the backstreets, picking up a dashing Cretan who had been exiled for killing in a blood feud and whose ‘bright teeth and ringing laughter’ were, Paddy noted, ‘instinct with the vitality and spirit of his own fierce island’. In a typical piece of Paddy engineering, they went for drinks with Burgundian writer Count Reynald de Simony, ‘living among beautiful furniture and thousands of books, in scholarly seclusion’ in a little Venetian castle at the top of the town. The count then emerged from seclusion to join the cruise. On they went, pausing at Amorgos to toast each other under vine trellises and climb to the Monastery of the Blessed Virgin, built in 1088 on the orders of Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos. In a vaulted refectory monks laid out a lunch of wine, eggs and goats’ cheese. Another bibulous feast was shared on the waterfront of Naxos, the island where Theseus was tricked into abandoning Ariadne and where they parted from Reynald de Simony.

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Essie Craxton and Rolls Royce

Timetables were beckoning as they charted a route through a chain of islands to Piraeus – better prepared than Theseus who, in grief for Ariadne, had forgotten to signal his triumph over the Minotaur by hoisting a white sail, so that his father, Aegeus, had leapt from a Sounion cliff in despair, to give the Aegean Sea its name. Then a storm blew up and Eliki anchored in a bay off Paros, where the sea-hating captain said they could be held for days. Victims of deadlines took flight, landing on the lovely island for a spontaneous party – a farmhouse feast (bread, cheeses, freshly killed chickens and demijohns of wine) ending with mass singing. Next morning their hosts waited with mules to take them, their luggage and the last case of Pommery across Paros, through calamus reeds and oleanders, to catch the twice-weekly ferry to Piraeus and then aeroplanes to New York and London. And now John and Marigoula – as Margot was known to the cruise party – began the physical affair that had been building for months. ‘She was like any artist in her attitude to love: completely pagan’, John remembered. ‘At the time I knew her she was a very grand bohemian.’3 He thought her ‘quite ravishingly beautiful…’: I used to watch from the wings and one day I suddenly had a revelation. I realised what form in space was. It was like looking at a statue. A lot of statues are not good all the way round – they have a back and a front. But she had sides to her. There was a wonderful seamless beauty about her … Of course I was in love with her. What else could you be? She became part of my family.4 Margot adored Harold and Essie. When they acquired an old Rolls Royce, Essie acted as her chauffeur. Harold told the dancer not to think they had gone up in the world; the Roller had come down: but he kept a case of

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Château Margaux for when she came to Sunday lunch. John took care to keep on the right side of Black Queen, who taught him to make mayonnaise while never mixing up her aim for Margot to marry money. There was romance as well as sexual attraction – once, walking through the East End, John called Margot from every phone box to say ‘Hello’ over and over. They knew it would not last: two resolute artists rarely live in harmony; plus, Margot needed money and John was drawn to men. They threw themselves into work – John was preparing a show of Greek pictures at the Leicester Galleries. This panegyric to youth and vigour and life in the sun was partnered with a memorial show to Neo-Romantic Denton Welch, who had finally succumbed, aged 31, to his injuries from a bicycling accident 13 years earlier. In a hectic year, John was heeding Peter Watson’s advice and fitting in two months of life drawing back at the Académie Julian in Paris. Margot was starring with Michael Somes in Freddie’s next ballet, Tiresias, another breakneck Covent Garden production opening on 9 July. It had a new score by Constant Lambert and décor by his wife, Isabel, a friend of John from war-time Soho. The Greek myth of a sex-changing prophet had inspired Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, but it was a daring piece to set before the Queen as Sadlers Wells Ballet’s Festival of Britain offering – with an orgasmic pas de deux devised by Freddie, and phallic snakes and bare-breasted Minoan figures designed by Isabel. Margot looked like a figure on a Knossos fresco, in an almost transparent costume. Although they had not sailed as far as Crete, the Greek cruise had an invigorating impact. Opening with a bull-leapers’ dance, the production bombed like no other. A lethal review by Richard Buckle provoked a lawsuit from Constant Lambert in the weeks before his 46th birthday, when he drank himself to death. Margot, never showing her emotions in public, wept on John’s shoulder. Then she consoled herself with another Greek cruise – on Sir Alexander Korda’s yacht Elsewhere – during which she flirted with Graham Greene. John understood perfectly. He would follow his Leicester Galleries show with another liberating sojourn on Crete – the longest yet. The physical side of their affair soon ended, but friendship lasted. Margot bought a painting of copulating goats from John’s 1951 exhibition. Both had a robust sense of humour. For August 1952, the Eliki party reassembled high above the Amalfi coast of southern Italy at Ravello – so high, they were told, that the blue view from the hotel belvedere would seem as if from an aeroplane. Margot and Freddie came from a gala performance in Paris. Joan drove John and Paddy on a meandering journey from England in an old Bentley – the slow ride through France and Italy all the slower because the fuel-guzzling motor, nicknamed Moloch (after the Canaanite god with an appetite for sacrificial children), kept breaking down. There were no breaks in the conversation and sensory satisfactions as they enjoyed Romanesque churches, Etruscan tombs at Tarquinia and memorable meals from the Loire Valley to Lucca, Pisa and Rome.

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At the Villa Cimbrone they found a medieval farmhouse turned Edwardian theatre set – a Moorish, Venetian and Gothic fantasy for a reckless English banker linked to the Bloomsbury Group. The outlook was indeed magnificent from a castle in the air that, after boating upsets of the previous summer, was also safely grounded. Margot brought her business adviser; she certainly needed one, but his suspicions of her spendthrift friends spoiled the holiday spirit. Plus, Joan and Paddy – avoiding criticism of others and suffering agonies if they offended anyone – were trying desperately not to notice that generous Tom Fisher was a crashing bore. Luckily, shipowner John Carras – who, besotted with Margot, had already wooed the Daphnis and Chloë crew to his London house with promises of caviar and vodka – phoned with news that his yacht was berthed in the harbour. ‘Come for a meal’, he said. ‘There’s lots of caviar.’ Over dinner he offered them a cruise to anywhere they wished to go. John then plotted a passage to Cape Palinuro and the Doric temples in the coastal city of Paestum. The tourists took a motor launch to the island of Gallo Lungo, then owned by Russian ballet master Léonide Massine (and later by Rudolf Nureyev). They explored the windswept outcrop – whose few pine trees had guy ropes to stop them being blown over – before tip-toeing into the big house. Here the master was found barefoot and taking a nap. Stifling giggles, the intruders inserted a card between two Russian toes before fleeing. As the party sailed away a female figure waved and shouted from the pier. It was unclear whether Madame Massine was berating trespassers or begging their return, so they ignored her. She may well have been warning them of the fast approaching storm – after which they felt lucky to make landfall. Days later, when meeting the Massines properly, Freddie, John and Margot were pondering a new ballet based on The Tempest. In the end it was deemed too tricky to stage. John loved to see Margot dance. He was always turning up at Covent Garden, cadging materials when not retouching sets, and forever in need of loans and advances. He often sneaked into rehearsals; he saw every new production if he possibly could, and was an amusing asset at backstage parties. On 23 March 1953 Margot wrote to Harold and Essie: Thank you so much for your sweet note on Wednesday. It was really the most exciting evening I have ever known. I was completely overwhelmed. I do wish you had been there for the champagne in the dressing room. Johnny worked overtime opening bottles! Starring in Freddie’s Apparitions ballet on Coronation Night, Margot had received 15 curtain calls: in an 11-minute ovation she was crowned queen of dance. Six months later, performing in New York, the empress became enslaved when a romantic attachment from her youth made a forceful reappearance. Roberto ‘Tito’ Arias – now a stout Panamanian diplomat with a wife and three children – demanded marriage before he had discussed divorce.

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The diplomacy did not last either. In thrall to a jealous womaniser, Margot returned the portrait of Constant Lambert to the closet and erased John and other lovers from her backstory. Always discrete, her friendships became more distant. She danced Daphnis and Chloë in Paris in 1955, on the night before marrying Tito. The designer was not invited. ‘I thought Margot had terrible taste in people’, John said. ‘But, being a pragmatic person myself, I realised she was desperate to find some sort of security.’5 In May 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay scaled Everest, a feat heralding the ambition of a new Elizabethan era but failing to register with John Craxton. He was agog in June, however, with news that Michael Ventris, his exact contemporary, was close to deciphering the later of the two Minoan scripts, Linear B. Fascination with mysteriously inscribed clay seals had prompted Arthur Evans to dig at Knossos, with an aim of tracing the origins of the Greek language. Aged 14 – when John first saw Picasso’s Guernica – Michael Ventris heard Evans talk at a Royal Academy exhibition of Greek archaeology. Afterwards the speaker confirmed that Linear B remained unsolved, so the schoolboy vowed to crack the code. This task persisted during training as an architect. In September 1953, he and his wife, Lois (known as Betty), moved into a house of their own design at North End, Hampstead. Philhellenes flock together, and John attended Ventris parties along with the writer, film critic and archaeologist’s widow Dilys Powell. John relished the discovery that Linear B was Greek at its most archaic – though ultimately disappointed that the clay seals, baked in fires that destroyed Knossos, were little more than lists. Revelations of human sacrifice and cannibalism did not dispel his faith in a civilisation whose freedom was so clearly expressed in its art. Neither did the solving of Linear B lighten Michael Ventris’s darkness. He died one night in September 1956, aged 34, when his car crashed into a parked lorry, to leave another mystery. John and Betty Ventris remained friends in London and Greece.

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BLOODY BLIGHTY

On 25 October 1953, Peter Watson wrote from London to John Craxton on Poros: ‘Everyone is being arrested for buggery or cruising – I suppose you see the [Daily] Express – Lord Montagu, Rupert Croft-Cooke, Sir J. Gielgud. So guilt is all the rage here.’ Britain was going through one of its periodic bouts of moral panic – with gay men easy prey for a crackdown. Popular author Rupert Croft-Cooke met two navy cooks in the Fitzroy Tavern – a gay pick-up pub well known to John Craxton – and took them to a country house for the weekend. On their way home the drunken sailors assaulted a policeman, who let them off in return for helping to catch the bigger fish that was Rupert Croft-Cooke: he was jailed for indecency. Sir John Gielgud was fined after falling into a police trap in a Chelsea public lavatory, lured by the usual bait of the plain-clothed and unzipped copper. Although his career was saved, with a standing ovation in a Liverpool theatre on the day the story broke, the actor later suffered a nervous breakdown. The biggest sensation was the prosecution of Lord Montagu. Britain’s youngest peer was among three men charged after a beach party with two airmen. Another of the accused was John’s Dorset friend Michael Pitt Rivers, Lord Montagu’s cousin. With the proceedings reported in prurient detail, the trio was jailed for ‘consensual homosexual offences’. The case – and particularly the fact that the third defendant, journalist Peter Wildeblood, changed his plea to guilty and dared to invoke a right to personal freedom – changed British social history. Public opinion turned, slowly but surely, towards a view that what consenting adults did in private was pretty much their own affair. Ministers caught the mood and set up a Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution under educationalist Sir John Wolfenden. It reported, in 1957, that while homosexual acts might be offensive, they should not be crimes if committed within a very strict definition of privacy. However limited and disdainful, this was at least a start – though too little and too late for John Craxton’s generation. Although he might appear the soul of indiscretion, John was generally more guarded than certain of his relatives. When Robin Craxton had wanted to look up cousin Ben Horniman in wartime Bombay, Essie had been vague about the address, saying ‘anyone will know where to find him’. All too true. Robin, the most strait-laced of all the Craxtons, was directed to a household of handsome boys, where Ben reclined in wafty silk, nail varnish and make-up.

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It was suddenly clear why he kept away from England. Essie and Harold were to rue the return from France of a very naughty gay nephew, whose escapades landed him in newspaper columns. Since his name was also Harold Craxton there was confusion and embarrassment. Antony Craxton, soon to direct BBC coverage of royal events, registered stern disapproval. He was now a respectable family man, married to Nancy Cropper from a well-to-do Westmoreland family and with two adopted children. John was no campaigner and never part of a crowd. (‘If I make a statement it’s mine, not part of a chorus.’) As an artist he identified only with himself, and his sexuality – like so many people’s – was complex and, early on at least, fluid. He might be best described as a homosexual who loved women and sometimes, until around the time the Wolfenden committee was forming, went to bed with female friends as an extension of friendship. While his deepest desires lay with men, he loved the sensuality and individuality of every human being. It’s all out there in the pictures. In Greece there was a gay circle in and around the British Council whose members could be critical of John Craxton – none more so than the novelist Francis King. A mocking tone he detected in John’s conversations with Lady Norton about overt homosexuals was never forgiven. ‘He did us a great deal of harm in our relations with the Embassy’, Francis said.1 There is irony here given the versatile nature of both the artist and the ambassador’s wife. But obviously gay people had every reason to feel shamefully treated in that closeted period, with casual homophobia openly expressed even within circles regarding themselves as bohemian. That landmark year of 1953 saw the publication of Mary Renault’s novel The Charioteer, with its perceptive and sympathetic treatment of same-sex relationships. The Second World War saga became a weapon in the struggle for sexual tolerance, and ultimately for social acceptance and legal equality, the message underscored in later Renault stories set in Ancient Greece. An episode at a clandestine homosexual drinks party summed up John’s attitude, and those of many others at the time: They had not merely accepted their limitations, as Lawrie was ready to accept his … They had identified themselves with their limitations; they were making a career of them. They had turned from all other reality, and curled up in them snugly, as in a womb.2 There was also the matter of being categorised and marginalised as a gay artist, and then the question of simple survival. The repressive nature of post-war Britain had a deeply constrictive and depressive effect. It played a part in the sad post-war decline of the two Roberts, though the drinks in their hands and the chips on their shoulders were even more lethal. John last saw Robert Colquhoun after the premiere of Donald of the Burthens, the ballet he designed for Covent Garden, late in 1951: he was railing drunkenly in the

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Royal Opera House foyer; the painter of such youthful promise was dead a decade later at the age of 47. Robert MacBryde, an unmerry widower, died in a street accident after leaving a Dublin pub. The yearning art of John Minton conveys coded messages via an air of male availability and arousal. Keith Vaughan’s private pictures verge on pornography while exhibited compositions of naked men in couplings and groupings suggest a hidden obsession with homosexual sex, since genitals are pointedly painted out. Minton killed himself in 1957, at 39; Vaughan took an overdose 20 years later, ending his lonely diary mid-sentence, having turned from physical relations to a masturbatory machine of his own invention. England killed them; Greece saved John Craxton. John was sexually uninhibited and at times amazingly rash. A yacht once sailed into Poros that belonged to Cincinnati businessman and fixer Julius ‘Junkie’ Fleischmann, who sailed the world with famous friends in tow. This cruising party included the Spenders and John’s Greek-American film-star idol Zachary Scott and his actress wife, Ruth Ford. Some of the guests had a jolly time in a taverna, before the wives returned to the yacht. John said: We stayed on, getting drunker and more and more affectionate with sailor boys, who we eventually took back to the boat. We were all having it away on deck while the wives were sleeping below. Talk about living dangerously, I remember thinking. He was both a singular artist and a social animal uncaged by any sub-culture. As such he was part of the brilliant picture constructed by Lee Miller in words and photos for a Vogue article published in July 1953. She and Roland Penrose had turned a Sussex farmhouse into a Surrealist hothouse for creative friends from Picasso and Man Ray to young contemporary British painters and sculptors. John said: I dreaded going to Farley Farm the first time because English country houses were so cold – maybe warm sitting rooms but bedrooms and bathrooms were icy. When I stayed with Duncan Grant at Charleston I went to bed with all my clothes on. He had a warm studio but the rest of the house was freezing. The whole house was decorated to look like June and July – butterflies, flowers and nakedness – and it was like an ice cube. But Lee made sure that the entire house was warm. It wasn’t a swish décor but grand bohemia – wonderfully relaxed. Everything centred on painting and conversation and conviviality. Except that the Vogue feature had been titled ‘Working Guests’. Lee explained in comically devious detail how, while she pretended to be tied to the kitchen and then dozed on a sofa, visitors were enlisted into keeping house and farm in order – artist Dorothea Tanning turning electrician while

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Self Portrait with Sphinxes by Lee Miller for Vogue Studio, 1940

New York’s Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr fed pigs. ‘It doesn’t take much plotting to lead someone up a garden path, especially a literal one’, Lee added, proving the point with pictures of Max Ernst planting borders, Henry Moore moving his sculpture and ‘rising young painter and ballet-designer John Craxton’ up a ladder and pruning a tree. Many visitors also produced art – John painting happily with Lee and Roland’s young son, Tony. Lee had already related, in a Vogue feature for Picasso’s retrospective show at the ICA, how the septuagenarian and three-year-old Tony painted together – and bit each other while playing: In Tony’s early vocabulary the words picture and Picasso were synonymous, I suppose because Roland and I referred to the same painting as ‘picture’ and ‘Picasso’ interchangeably and the words started the same. Later, he realized that Picasso was a man, who, like Daddy and himself, made pictures. ‘Pictures’ include Craxton, Max Ernst, Klee, Braque. Although I don’t know which generic term he uses for them, naturalistic or whimsy illustrations, and photographs, are not ‘pictures’.3 Much as John admired Roland Penrose, and enjoyed painting with Tony, Lee was the lure for him. She was ‘a breath of fresh air in a country where people tended, even tried to conform; she collected all those who were déraciné, like herself’.4 Although she represented ‘the pre-war era, a time of utter freedom’, her world was in fact increasingly compressed. She now preferred not to venture far, and her art was confined to the concoction of surreal meals with the aid of alcohol, a thousand cookery books and choice avant-garde artworks (a blue fish in honour of a Miró). John thought her

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Painting with Tony Penrose, by Lee Miller, 1951

kitchen ‘a heavenly place always full of open bottles of booze and a potent cider anyone could swig at’.5 He helped Lee to make a mayonnaise using the red algae known as carrageen moss instead of olive oil. He loved the way she purred when he massaged her back. Sexual possibility simmered at Farley Farm. John was working on jacket designs for two wartime memoirs – A.M. Rendel’s Appointment In Crete: The Story of a British Agent and Xan Fielding’s The Stronghold. To refresh his memory, Xan had returned to former haunts with Daphne Thynne, the Marchioness of Bath, who was about to become his wife. But for much of the first year of the Second World War he had retired to a private Greek island off Evia – sole companion, save for a retinue of Greek boys, to the former archaeologist Francis TurvillePetre, a homosexual mystic later caricatured in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Down There on a Visit. Xan had been much more than a visitor. He described his guru’s death – in Cairo, in 1941 – as ‘a personal loss for which nothing has since compensated’.6 Life can be complicated.

Jacket for The Stronghold, by Xan Fielding, 1953

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All actively gay men – even the most monogamous – were forced into furtiveness and subterfuge in 1950s Britain. Whenever he was back in England John stayed partly with his family in Kidderpore Avenue, but more often in his Clifton Hill studio. Although his parents were remarkably tolerant of the friends he brought home, and who might then stay over, John preferred to take casual pick-ups to his studio. Much as he hated armies and navies, he loved a man in uniform: I had a wonderful time going down to Soho and bringing back a soldier or sailor. I loved their company; they were all so nice and with such open natures. I never had sex with anyone who didn’t make the first move. Late in the evening I’d say, ‘There’s a single bed with fresh sheets on it, or you can sleep with me in the double bed – whichever you prefer.’ Almost always they would choose my bed, ‘I’m easy John, I don’t mind kipping down with you.’ There was never any trouble. My only worry was that when I came back with anyone on the bus, I used to make him walk ahead of me when we got off. My brother Antony lived by the bus stop and he would be certain to spy on me.

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I SPY TROUBLE

In the early 1950s John Craxton travelled widely around the Mediterranean, but most especially in Greece. He was packing for Crete, and apparently dressed for the winter journey, when John Deakin managed to snap him for a Vogue feature on contemporary British art. In May 1954 his third solo show at the Leicester Galleries confirmed his stature as a premier portraitist of the Greek world; but to insular Britain that meant a promising artist who had gone off in every sense. The point was made most forcefully when Francis

John Craxton by John Deakin, 12 December 1951 Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Ltd

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Bacon, Lucian Freud and Ben Nicholson were chosen to represent Britain in that year’s Venice Biennale. A former golden boy was thought to be adrift from the deadly serious business of art and lost in limbo. As Cyril Connolly observed: ‘Early laurels weigh like lead.’1 In fact, John’s life and art were blossoming in his adopted home. The reinvigorated cubism of his early Aegean pictures was now giving way to a brilliantly linear painting method owing much to the antique art of Greece and most to Byzantine mosaics and frescoes. Experimenting with materials in every picture, he was moving from oils to his own version of tempera – its dry, chalky look rendering Greek scenes with ever greater clarity and authenticity. He mixed his own media with painstaking precision and would always favour the best that (mostly other people’s) money could buy – once asking: ‘Have you ever played on a nasty piano and then tried your hands on a Steinway?’2 And yet he was also alert to anything useful that could be salvaged and repurposed. He liked a combination of soft sable and stiff hog-hair brushes. Now form and volume might be fleshed out like relief sculpture with the building repairer’s medium of Polyfilla, applied with a palette knife. Slender means and unpressing schedules made for staggered journeys by trains and ferries to and from Greece, with endless opportunities for adventure. Between London and the Aegean there were chances to linger in Calais, Paris, Marseilles, Brindisi and Piraeus, any of which were also steppingoff points for tempting diversions farther afield. A wanderer alert to the romantic possibilities of people and places might meander with his sketchbook in Brittany, the Côte d’Azur, Apulia or Attica, while vaguely heading for a Greek island studio. He collected friends en route – especially in Paris. John was the same age as James Lord, who had arrived in the city with American forces in 1944, befriending Picasso and still more Dora Maar. James returned as a would-be novelist who was more assiduous in courting boyfriends, acquiring and dealing pictures and compiling diary accounts of encounters with famous artists. Eventually those journals provided the material for books on Picasso and Maar, and Alberto Giacometti. He also saved Cézanne’s studio. John and James had an early affair and a lasting friendship – as was the Craxton way. James preferred pictures to people, especially when they were portraits of himself. Beside his bed he kept a Craxton self-portrait from the late 1940s – hanging it between works by Cézanne and Balthus and dubbing it ‘a beautifully realized image of an artist in the full faith and freedom of his creative vision’. He published his memories of posing for a 1954 portrait by Craxton between recollections of sitting for Maar and Giacometti: Once again I posed in the narrow bedroom of a modest hotel. John rapidly produced a pleasing, though somewhat conventional likeness. It satisfied me at once, but he didn’t agree, insisting that my features

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wanted a more intense stylistic interpretation. I pleaded for the portrait to remain as it was, as I was later fated to do with Alberto Giacometti, to no avail whatsoever in either case.3 John met up and occasionally shacked up with Richard Olney, another American in Paris, trying at that time to be a painter but falling headlong for epicurean France. Moving to a hillside in Provence, he dug out a wine cave by hand, built a traditional brick cooking hearth in his kitchen and punctuated bohemian solitude with sumptuous entertaining. John gladly diverted on journeys to and from Greece. Richard, happily diverged from the path of a painter, illustrated his celebrated books on French cooking with delectable drawings. Passionate about cinema, John was later to be instructed in the genius of the French New Wave directors Godard, Truffaut and Resnais by another ex-pat American, Richard Roud – briefly a lover and permanently a friend (though unusually aggrieved when their physical liaison ended since he had fallen in love with John). Serving as a model in several Craxton pictures, the film critic was convincingly recast as a Greek shepherd. From 1954 there was fresh trouble in paradise. Anglo-Greek relations came under severe strain, putting pressure on all Britons living in the Aegean, no matter how philhellene they might be. The cause of the conflict was Cyprus, where British rulers had replaced Ottomans in 1878 and declared a Crown Colony as late as 1925. More than 80 per cent of the population identified – linguistically, culturally, spiritually – as Greek, and agitation for union with Greece was now boiling over, spilling on to the streets and into armed insurrection. Britain claimed to be preventing civil war between Greek and Turkish sides, while attending to the greater priority of maintaining a strategic base in the eastern Mediterranean. As the initials of the EOKA militants were being daubed on walls throughout the Greek world, British ex-pats and exiles came metaphorically, and occasionally literally, into the firing line. Old friendships were bruised or broken. The sorting of visas in civil service labyrinths, and checks of papers in police stations, now became more arbitrary and onerous. Leave to remain could be curtailed or changed to summary expulsion on an official’s whim. Sensible people became cautious and quiet, but John Craxton never did. He openly argued with the Mastropetros family in defending the British position on Cyprus, abhorring war in almost any circumstance and accepting the official peace-keeping line now coming from London. They knew him to be basically benevolent and essentially pro-Greek. They loved him too dearly to take offence – their passionate disputes passing into the fond family legend of funny Johnny. Others did not take such an affectionate view. In 1950s Greece the culture of generosity to incomers – philoxenia, the word for hospitality, translating literally as love of strangers – had survived a history of invasion by foreigners. But the selfless welcome given to a temporary guest, and especially an

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English speaker, came under stress when the visitor looked like becoming a permanent resident. Greeks were baffled that any outsider from a wealthier country would choose to settle among them. Most had known such hardship that they believed in greener fields abroad. Even before a migratory flow of the rural poor to Athens turned into a flood, millions dreamed of a better life in the United States, or in Britain and its ex-dominions from Canada to South Africa and Australia. Hundreds of thousands secured such a switch, if not such a dream. From the 1960s economic necessity would eclipse popular memory as many took high-paid jobs in the rebuilding of West Germany. Anyone moving in the opposite direction, and forsaking material wealth and comfort for a simple life in the sun, appeared irrational. Unless, of course, these notetaking and sketch-making writers, painters, teachers and drifters were not what they seemed. Their restless and ruminative lives were surely covers for careers in espionage. In post-war Greece it was generally assumed that any lingering foreigner was a spy – which some undoubtedly were. Wherever he went, John Craxton was a sitting target for such suspicion. He sought out military personnel. And the fact that so erudite and upper-class a man craved the company of ordinary conscripts – whose peasant language he curiously emulated – seemed to prove an unhealthy interest in naval intelligence. He did, of course, love a sailor with a lively mind, but that was never quite the point. Conspiracy theorists can lack not only perspective but also a sense of humour. In January 1955 a group of men from Poros hatched a gun-running plot to arm the incipient Cypriot rebellion. On a caique called St George – the patron saint of Greece and England – they sailed to southern Crete where the arms shipment was loaded, and on to Cyprus. When the plotters approached the coast, a British military force was waiting. Although dumping the cargo overboard, they were arrested, tried and jailed. The impounded boat is moored in Paphos harbour to this day, as a museum to the cause of Cypriot and Greek self-determination. Who betrayed the Hellenic patriots? John Craxton frequented the gun-runners’ favourite taverna on Poros and was rumoured to have been in the crucial vicinity of Crete around the time the guns were shipped. Moreover, he made no secret of having friends at the British Embassy in Athens, some of whom were covert intelligence officers. Every Greek finger pointed to him as the guilty party, save for those who really knew him. Since he could never keep a secret or a low profile, he was poor material for a conventional secret agent. Just as he was unable to resist a dire joke, he never lost a love of devilment – saving his crudest words in Greek for the most shockable listeners. Might his very implausibility have been a convincing cover? He was more likely to have blabbed at a late-night party than put in a quiet and deliberate word in the sobriety of a Greek morning. The best argument against his implication in one of the great disasters of

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Three Dancers – Poros, 1953– 4 Oil on canvas, 100 × 81 cm. Lincoln College, Oxford

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post-war British foreign policy is the key matter of his personal loyalty and creative motivation. The first to brand him a spy was that Dorset policeman early in the Second World War. That incident attested to a lifelong habit of asking for trouble or at least of never seeing it coming. More tellingly, during the long conflict with Hitler – a struggle between good and evil if ever there was one – he had done next to nothing to aid the British side, apart from in the morale-boosting promulgation of his art; though in his wayward creativity he pleased himself and perhaps a few close friends. In so many ways, John Craxton despised Britain. He escaped as soon as he could and knew how much he owed to Greece. The evidence is all in the pictures: they are a declaration of love for the subject in which there is no hidden agenda and no deception. His paintings and drawings – his true passport – are wholly philhellene. Still more, they are not the cool observations of an Englishman abroad but the passionate absorptions of an adopted Greek. But Greece was ever a giant rumour mill, and John Craxton was convicted of treachery in the court of Poriot public opinion after a whispering campaign against him. He courted such a verdict by appearing to abscond when the allegations were being muttered, as if in tacit admission of the crime. Most damning of all, he spent a month in Athens staying with Brigadier Godfrey Hobbs, the British military attaché and presumed spymaster. How to explain that he craved the company of the officer’s wife? Marguerite Hobbs was as free-spirited as John himself and would eventually be divorced by the brigadier in a scandalous adultery case. There was fun and there was funny business and John’s enemies assumed the sordid worst. In truth, he had pressing personal and professional reasons for moving on. By this point he had exhausted the inspirations of Poros and wanted to explore wilder parts of Greece. He was also being offered grand, free and open-ended accommodation on the beguiling island of Hydra – in the ancestral mansion of Nico Ghika. It made absolute sense in his terms that he should have wanted to leave – and in fact he returned regularly to see the Mastropetros family – but his bad reputation on his first Greek island seemed to have been settled for good. In 2015, six years after John’s death, Poros council considered naming streets after several eminent foreign visitors. He had the strongest claim in length of stay and depth of feeling. Street signs were duly produced in the names of Marc Chagall, Lucian Freud and Greta Garbo. John Craxton was vetoed since he was still believed, 60 years after the sad saga of the St George caique, to have been a British spy. Meanwhile, back in London, John was willingly drawn into a spying saga of a more appealing kind. Returning to his Clifton Hill studio late one evening, and for once on his own, he disturbed a peeping Tom on a skylight. The young man was then invited in for a drink and ended up spending the first of many nights in the Craxton bed. John ‘Spud’ Murphy had a seductively

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John ‘Spud’ Murphy

hard working-class accent from Northern Ireland and a wicked grin all his own. Unburdened by any kind of sexual reservation, he had worked evening shifts as a male prostitute while performing National Service in the Irish Guards. Hyde Park and a well-known round of nearby pubs made for a profitable cruising ground. When he had trousered a handsome sum from gay clients, Spud treated himself to a female prostitute. By and large he preferred sex with women but was happy go lucky and ever ready to mix business with pleasure. ‘My motto is, come one, come all; I’ll love you all’, he said.4 John perceived latent talent in his flexible lover: such an energetic voyeur might have hidden skills as a photographer. So John bought him a camera and a hunch proved correct. Given all their contacts across gay London, Spud began to make a living as a lensman, while continuing to turn tricks as a hustler. As an odd-job man with a sideline in sex, he worked for a time as a driver and non-motoring serviceman to the Courtauld Institute of Art professor and spymaster Anthony Blunt. John paid him to model in the studio, where he sometimes posed as a piper since he played the penny whistle. Most significantly, he became the model for a major painting of a butcher, with numerous attendant studies. Drawing on memories of the dancing butcher of Crete, these are among John’s most erotically charged pictures. Spud’s forthright amorality also made him a favourite with Lucian and gradually the walls of his council flat in Hampstead became studded with gifted Freuds and Craxtons. Spud Murphy was to perform another great service to the joy of John’s life. The former soldier cut a dash revving across London on a BSA Bantam; and John – a dab hand at cadging lifts – was soon being ferried on the back. The design for the sleek lightweight motorbike had been taken from

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The Butcher, 1964–6 Oil on canvas, 208.3 × 320 cm. Private collection

Germany as a war reparation, for manufacture at the Birmingham Small Arms Company, with the uniform colour initially a semi-militaristic pale green. It was sex on wheels. Like his father, John would never learn to drive a car, but he was instantly converted to motorbikes: the test to gain his rider’s licence was the only formal examination, practical or intellectual, he ever passed. He immediately bought himself a Triumph Trophy – the 650cc TR6 that Steve McQueen rode in the 1963 film The Great Escape, disguised as a wartime German model. That film title could also have doubled for John Craxton’s life story. He took friends (Freddie Ashton, John Betjeman) on the back – but Francis Bacon refused in terror. It was not his kind of danger.

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THE SEA CHANGE

Among motley ferries operating from 1950s Piraeus, the most elegant served Hydra. Strung with lights and bunting as if for a constant carnival, Neraida had been by repute the private yacht of Count Ciano, the Fascist foreign minister who ordered Italy’s abortive invasion of Greece in 1940. The luxurious vessel was the sweetest war reparation. Not that the count knew it, having been shot on the orders of his father-in-law, Benito Mussolini, in 1944. Now the party ferry anchored in the gulf while a rowing boat took John to the quay. So noble a yacht was a fitting tribute, for Hydra had supplied much of the naval force that won Greek independence. Its leading families had made fortunes blockade-running during the Napoleonic Wars to trade between Spain and the Black Sea. Permitted to fly the Russian flag, they had English and French ensigns at the ready to haul matching colours up the mast when a man-of-war came over the horizon. Bags of gold coins were reputedly stored in the water cisterns over which they built well-proportioned mansions dressed with gorgeous imported furnishings and fittings: their best asset was good taste. The merchant-prince palaces, together with fine captain’s houses and fair dwellings for profit-sharing crews, were tiered above the port like an amphitheatre; on an arid, searing island, most people got a cooling breeze and a sea view. To Jane Howard, sent by John and finding a setting for her next novel, the tumbling terraces of cubed houses looked ‘as though someone had spilled a packet of lump sugar from the top of the mountain and most of it had rolled to the bottom’.1 The admirals of Greek independence had sacrificed their wealth in a national struggle and then lost livelihoods in a changed commercial world. Their warships had stripped mountain slopes of soil-securing pines, so that each winter, when the port-town’s cobbled lanes became rivers, a little more of Hydra washed into the sea. On an island where no new house had been constructed for 125 years, many buildings were now eroding towards romantic ruin. There had been a modest return to money through sponge-diving – John mingled with the last in the line, who left for North Africa after Easter and returned from late October, until by 1960 all had gone. Even in its reduced state, Hydra was a hive of life. The hulls of wooden fishing boats were still being spined and ribbed, caulked and painted at the water’s edge as if in the era of Homer. A covered market had been converted into a faltering electricity plant, so the agora was again the harbourside – stores, warehouses, workshops jostled together. Then, as now, Hydra had

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no motor traffic; everyone and everything moved on foot, mule and donkey save for later garbage trucks. Old tyres were cut up for soles of shepherds’ boots and fishermens’ sandals – many of whose owners still spoke the Albanian of migrant forebears. The few tourists were put up in the Poseidon Hotel, beside a post office and a general store that became twin focal points for those who stayed on. Waiting for the daily mailboat was more pleasant at tables provided by the Katsikas brothers – wholesalers, retailers, bartenders – under the shop awning in summer or in the stockroom at the back in winter. Either way, roistering ran late into the night. For several years from 1955, the Australian writers Charmian Clift and her husband George Johnston held court here for admiring ex-pats – North Americans, Australasians, Scandinavians. The partners had already collaborated on a novel about sponge divers, while living on Kalymnos, and now were trawling their life stories for memoir and fiction. Meanwhile they talked and drank – alcoholism, and the tuberculosis George contracted in Greece, worsening financial worries. Still, it was a brilliant party while it lasted. Twenty mansions of Hydra’s great families – Boudouris, Ghika, Koundouriotis, Kriezis, Tombazi, Tsamados, Votsis, Voulgaris – survived in varying degrees of disarray. The Tombazi house held an annex of the Athens School of Fine Arts and John was soon friendly with its principal, Pericles Byzantios. The Tsamados pile was of even more interest to him as it had become a Maritime Academy, whose students ambled along the quay and unwound in bars where they often became his models. Below a Koundouriotis house there was swimming from Spilia rocks, with shade in the furnace heat of summer afternoons, and sometimes, during moonlit bathes, phosphorescence spangling flesh and water like liquid diamonds. Across the harbour, and just out of sight and sound, a slaughterhouse tipped bloodied gore into the sea – repelling bathers and, it was rumoured, attracting sharks. There was definitely a darker side to the bright beauty of Hydra. Most remote was the mansion of Nico Ghika’s maternal family. Reached from the port via a 30-minute walk, or a bumpy donkey ride, it stood aloof behind high boundary walls on a commanding position above the fishing and farming village of Kamini. The view over terraced gardens, trees and roof-tops – and on past a small harbour and across the Saronic Gulf to the Peloponnese – was the key influence of his creative life. As John wrote: It was the glorious fusion of sharp rocks, stones, thorny shrubs, fig trees, precipitous heights, small walled enclosures, blazing sunlight, steep stone pathways and exterior stairways, hidden courtyards, scraggy almond trees, half-ruined houses and windmills that helped to create Ghika’s unique and poetic style.2 Nico had spent childhood summers in the family eyrie and returned

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Two Bathers, 1958 Oil on canvas, 85 × 140 cm. Private collection

after two decades in Paris and Athens to rescue an inspiration from ruin. A modernist, he portrayed Hydra in cubist terms, and installed one of its first bathrooms with flushing water. A rolling programme of repairs and improvements added a magnificent studio. Textured like timber, its concrete ceiling formed an extensive terrace for the dining room. Further terracing led to what were dubbed ‘the Hanging Gardens of Babylon’. John became a trusted consultant on this work in progress as two artists with a shared gift for architecture and aesthetics grew ever closer. The house remained imprinted in his memory: To enter the spacious studio, well lit by two wide arched French windows, one descended a dark interior stairway guarded at the bottom by a large and splendid Egyptian turned wood screen … It provided an air of Oriental privacy.3 Nico Ghika also brought tourism to Hydra, via a procession of interesting visitors who then promoted its virtues in their work or by word of mouth: writers as diverse as Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Nancy Mitford, Freya Stark and Norman Mailer; architects Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius; poets George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis; photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Wolfgang Suschitzky; translators Kimon Friar and John Leatham; and many fellow painters often linked to the summer school. John, Joan and Paddy lodged so long and so often at the Ghika mansion, whether or not the owner was in residence, that they practically moved in. All three nomads

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looked on the house as their home in Greece – and freely invited other friends to stay for high days, holidays and lengthy spells beyond. On Hydra the painters were most enthralled by the ravishing quality of light. As Nico put it: At the midday hour, at the sun’s meridian, the whitewashed walls mirror an unbearable brilliance. Reflections off the sharp-edged stones, the lanceolate leaves, the acute angles of buildings emitted an incandescent haze that made the air seem to dance like a flame, to shudder as if at the passing of the haunting spirit of mystical high noon. You would say that Pan could have been heard on his pipes, bringing all things to a standstill and causing nature to hold her breath. The cube-shaped houses, like almond cakes dusted with rose-scented sugar, the lozenge-shaped roofs, and the serpentine enclosure walls – all were stilled.4 Here again was myth in everyday existence and the joy of sensual life. Nico had the serious countenance of his staid upbringing, struggles as a pioneering artist and perhaps of a marriage, to the considerably older Tiggie, that was more companionable than passionate. But he too was a sensualist and within his closest circle a figure of warmth and fun. The formal severity of the eighteenth-century family home was relaxed under his stewardship. It was to be a beautiful refuge where innovative art could be pondered and produced while far away from the muddles and troubles of the contemporary world; and, since the house was also discreetly servanted (by a resident housekeeper

Landscape on Plywood, 1956 Chalk on panel, 48.2 × 80 cm. Private collection

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and by farmer neighbour Barba Yannis and his wife and daughters), flagging spirits and energies could also be revived in perfect peace. Then, when work was set aside, there would be convivial meals and talk on the starlit terrace long past midnight, before the stillness of the next creative morning. But cisterns emptied in summer without the intervention of water boats, pumps and long pipes up the hillside. Tempers flared as boundary disputes sparked court cases and confrontations, with the housekeeper once punched by a neighbour. Then there was the nature of the punched man himself: Up here … its another world. All except for that rather sinister [housekeeper] both cunning and clumsy he gives off a sort of Duchess of Malfi atmosphere sometimes. He rather hates me because I do things in the house – Nico is not entirely dependant on him to bang a nail in the wall! Somewhere not too deep down in his nature lies a bitter slightly ruthless scheming man.5 Life at the Ghika house could be so satisfying, save for neighbours and non-caretakers, as to form a self-contained world. Donkeys were at hand, however, for the trip to town if the walk seemed too arduous and John was always slipping away on foot or hoof and into enchantment: Despite the locals the landscape is always very moving its forever changing & yet remains the same this metamorphic quality excites me the whole time. It comes to live with you in your mind and the result is that one doesn’t look at it as a picture or a view but as an extension of your own personal life its so clear too the terrific contrast in moving & static – about people walking between stone walls – goats & trees – cocks & white walls – electric bulbs & sounds of distant singing – & always ones nose picking up scents and smells.6 The quayside was the centre of social life – with the evening ritual of the volta, where groups of young men and women strolled in strict segregation but with watchful eyes crossing the chasm between them. The cleverest would know how to bend their parents’ ears when attraction was established and before marriages were arranged. Meanwhile, the girls spent sequestered days embroidering materials for their wedding chests. The male preserves of the bars and coffee-houses could be more louche as the evening progressed. John might strike up an understanding for a liaison that might then turn into an affair while never deflecting from the young man’s goal of marriage. If his own resolve failed in the matter of his future, he could generally be persuaded or bullied once parental negotiations were settled. The domestic social centre on Hydra to rival the Ghika house announced itself, on the left flank of the port, by a particular shade of blue paint to its woodwork. It was a rich, almost royal purplish hue named ‘Catherine’s Blue’

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after its commissioner. Madame Paouri was known to John as Madame Priority because her wishes held sway. When a neighbour presumed to copy her hallmark pigment, she sued and won. Loving her excesses, John was invited to escort her to dental appointments – in Switzerland. Catherine Paouri, née Papaleonardou, had been married to an Italian diplomat and a shipowner. While her ample figure grew with the decades, she retained the trim conviction of being the belle of her own ball. She insisted that the lovely girl on the 1,000 drachma banknote – pictured on the terrace of the Paouri house with its fabulous view over the harbour – was her younger self. The model was in truth the designer’s daughter, but in a land of myth it made for another compelling story. When Sophia Loren filmed Boy on a Dolphin on Hydra in 1956, Catherine was snapped beside the breathtaking beauty – smiling smugly at upstaging a supposed star. She was a larger than life figure of fun who enjoyed the narcissistic joke. Her chat up-line to someone of social interest ran: ‘Next you will come and visit my house. I have many things of a genuine character and of most things I have two.’ 7 John helped to fill Catherine’s house with arresting and surprising finds – architectural salvage, ship paintings and models, Ottoman glass and pottery, Venetian and Persian mirrors, English willow-pattern china, Japanese lacquer, Dutch tourist kitsch. A backdrop of books with fine bindings and uncut pages was a further decorative feature. Here were theatrical sets for the leading player in a light comedy of her own production. She wintered in an Athens flat where Kolonaki ladies were invited to French-speaking tea parties. One was held after a storm had torn the fruit from every tree in the street, so that a guest expressed astonishment to see oranges still hanging among balcony foliage. ‘Indeed, they all fell off’, the hostess confessed. ‘But I instructed my helper to tie them back on again.’ 8 Her life story was her guest book. Here were the names of so many visiting celebrities – with repeated Craxton signatures accompanied by amusing and affectionate drawings. The hostess loved the social cachet of artists and acquired a collection of gifts (while buying early canvases and commissioning floral swags for bathroom panels from a handsome young Hydriot painter, Panayiotis Tetsis). As John wrote to the Ghikas: Madame Paouri has been given a painting by [Yves] Klein … its small and the exact colour of her shutters. She had Tony Perkins to dinner and told him he looked like me. He didn’t care for that kind of compliment and took another swig of milk. The longest journey to the Paouri guestbook began in a Jewish shtetl. Forced to leave Russia by the Stalinist purge of unbridled art, Marc Chagall’s nostalgic images took on the further edge of exile. He had moved from Paris to America, where his beloved first wife died, leaving him bereft until a second marriage in 1952. There was then a prolonged Mediterranean honeymoon, by which

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Two Men in Taverna, 1953 Oil on canvas, 83.7 × 104.2 cm. Private collection

point Marc Chagall and John Craxton were unwittingly circling one another. The Paris-based art critic, patron and publisher Tériade – Stratis Eleftheriades – had a long-standing interest in Daphnis and Chloë, since the story was set on his native Lesbos. But it was most probably seeing the Craxton décor that prompted the art titan to propose the story to his friend Chagall for a suite of lithographs. Visiting Athens, Delphi and finally Poros, the honeymooning painter warmed to the ultra-romantic theme and began sketches for a scintillating book. John had narrowly missed him on Poros, where he was rowed from Villa Serenity to the ferry. Next day the boatman said: ‘I am always asking you to draw me, but yesterday a very famous artist put me in his drawing book – old man, white hair, name like Saga.’ They also failed to connect on a subsequent visit to Hydra, when the Russian artist was swept up among new arrivals for a Paouri party. The hostess soon wondered why she had extended an invitation to an old peasant when he mauled her precious guestbook with a childish caricature of a woman accepting a bouquet of flowers. John said that a few days later she showed the distressing daub to a friend who recognised the hand of one of the world’s most valuable living artists. The hostess collapsed

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on to a sofa, gasping: ‘If only I had known, I would have asked for a mural!’ John and Chagall finally met in England when Lady Norton arranged a trip to Henry Moore’s studio, where John witnessed a ‘marvellous non-meeting of minds’: None of those sleeping ladies could fly so there was no point to them. He did a wonderful drawing in the visitor’s book. He put his hand on one of the reclining figures and apologised. Moore said, ‘Rub it as much as you like. I like a nice patina’. John also planned a Kidderpore Avenue birthday party in the Russian artist’s honour – ‘his age was always uncertain since his parents had falsified his birth certificate to avoid the army’. Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and the Spenders attended; the great Russian soprano Oda Slobodskaya, a friend of Essie and Harold, ‘sang Mussorgsky songs about mushrooms’. The affable Chagall could not hide the fact that the music had failed to touch him – his memories and myths, the mainspring of his art, were all visual. Now, in his mind’s eye, they were all his own. He gladly accepted a gift of hand-made drawing paper and looked seriously at John’s pictures. ‘Il faut travailler’, he said. ‘Vous travaillez, vous avancez.’ He saw at once the deviations from the key task of art in the Craxton way of life.

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While his mind was fixed on Greece, John was often back in London for family, friends and contacts. His feelings about returning were put pithily on a 1954 postcard to the Mastropetros family – in Greek capital letters: ‘I AM VERY SAD. ENGLAND IS TERRIBLE. EVERYTHING. FOG. CLOUDS. RAIN. I WILL DIE. THREE MONTHS WITHOUT SUN.’ That wail of woe was penned while he was with Janet on a return visit to the Scilly Isles, normally the warmest, sunniest and least English part of England. London offered many diversions and work opportunities. In 1954, when Freud, Bacon and Nicholson represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, Bryan Robertson responded by omitting them from a British Painting and Sculpture 1954 survey at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, but including John Craxton. John quipped: ‘If Lucian’s British School, I’m Cretan School.’ His third solo show at the Leicester Galleries confirmed his drift. He savoured a high profile in the 1955 Arts Council touring exhibition of twentieth-century paintings belonging to Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, and enjoyed revisiting Cambridge for the launch. Grey and rainy Manchester, where he and Lucian exhibited with Hungarian Andras Kalman in a former air-raid shelter, was far less inviting. But alongside a discerning line selling contemporary art, Andras had a collector’s passion for antique naïve art and a fund of funny stories. When Crane Kalman Gallery opened in London in 1957, John often visited the Brompton Road premises. On return visits to Greece he paused in Athens, staying with the Ghikas or Aleca Stylou Diamantopoulos and leading a hectic social life. George Seferis was now mostly abroad on diplomatic postings, with four years as ambassador in London from 1957, but other artists were available: ‘I had a spaghetti dinner with Tsarouchis it began as a twosome & ended with unlimited numbers of athletes & Greek queens all out for a free meal – can you imagine? & with only three chairs.’ 1 For all the friendship and cross pollination with Nico Ghika, John’s artistic sensibility was in some ways nearer to Yannis Tsarouchis, given a shared focus on the male figure. But what at first look to be striking similarities, on closer examination broaden into distant kinship. The Piraeus-raised painter, pursuing a Greek fusion of archaic and modernist influences, depicted sailors, footballers and young men in cafés or dream settings often in heroic and homoerotic guises. First, last and always, John Craxton’s concern was with the individual. Once again, his links with

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another artist were primarily social. He also enjoyed meeting the modernist architect and politician Konstantinos Doxiadis, the first post-war Minister of Reconstruction. And he came to admire even more the architect, painter and urban planner Dimitris Pikionis, who, amid all the chaotic splurge of 1950s Athens, designed a graceful and apparently timeless landscape for the monuments of the Acropolis, with paths linking them structurally to Filopappou Hill. Meanwhile, the charmed life of the Ghika house was being regularly replenished with exciting new recruits. The Australian painter Sidney Nolan and his wife Cynthia stayed for several months from November 1955, John being impressed by the obsessive working method of a questing artist that entailed hundreds of drawings scattered over the studio floor as he built up to the big picture. Half the world away, an exile was getting to grips with the spirit of his homeland via images gathered from Greek mythology, animal bones and meditations on First World War slaughter of Anzac forces at Gallipoli. On either side of the Nolan residency, Joan and Paddy were installed for protracted periods. John was joining them, for the lovely May of 1956, when news arrived by letter from London that Peter Watson had drowned in his bath. His physical and mental health had long caused concern to the rather few people who really cared for him; but his death at the age of 47 brought brutal shock to the beneficiary of his kindness who loved him most dearly and with none of the resentment and recrimination that were all too often Peter’s reward. John’s great melancholic drawing from 1941, Poet in Landscape, was now returned to him as he set about depicting a grieving Greek youth as a tribute. Months earlier Peter had written: ‘I hear you plan to stay [in Greece] until next autumn. Are you taking out nationality papers? I hope you won’t be murdered.’ Even in the Blitz Lucian had portrayed the young patron as if on his deathbed. Later in the war Peter told John he had written ‘such an awfully gloomy letter that I tore it up’ and then went on to say: ‘I have come to the conclusion that I would rather die somewhere far away out of England than … in it and as soon as I can I shall put it into practice.’ A spiritual malaise in the young Peter Watson militated against old bones. Alongside brilliantly perceptive patronage, Peter had a passion for hopeless causes in his private life indicative of masochism – with years of torture from his drug-addled lover Denham Fouts followed by torment with the difficult and often absent Norman Fowler. When Norman conceded that they had quarrelled before Peter took a bath in a locked bathroom, rumours of foul play circulated and eventually firmed up in print. John remained adamant that it had been an accident – protesting in the margin of Michael Shelden’s otherwise applauded 1989 book Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon that murderous speculation amounted to ‘absurd innuendo’. Aware that Johnny Philipps had died in similar circumstances

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Elegiac Figure (in Memory of Peter Watson), 1957– 9 Tempera on board, 127 × 101.5 cm. Private collection

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Jacket for Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1958

eight years earlier, he exonerated Norman from all suspicion. Lightning can strike twice – thrice, even. By the time Shelden’s book was published Norman Fowler was long dead. Moving to the West Indies, he ran the Bath Hotel on Nevis until, aged 44, he drowned in a bath. Joan now looked out for John more than ever (‘Here’s an anti-birthday and anti-Christmas present which I meant to send you ages ago with lots of love’; ‘This cheque is because I am suddenly and unexpectedly rolling at the moment, can’t go into a shop and only like giving it to friends.’2) She bought pictures from his exhibitions and did all she could to promote his talent. Paddy might never have written a word without Joan’s adroit support. She was his travel companion, photographer and first critic. She got her publisher friend John ‘Jock’ Murray to look at his early manuscripts and then to bear with the typed and handwritten bundles of chaos – with additions, amendments and corrected corrections scrawled in a barely decipherable script – that would ultimately, after endless effort, become seamless books. She was key to the evolution of Paddy’s monastic meditation, A Time to Keep Silence (the title an ironic idea from her brother Graham for a man who never stopped talking). The text had been published in a 1953 Queen Anne Press fine edition – managed by novelist Ian Fleming, whose wife, Annie, was one of Joan’s oldest friends. Joan probably sponsored it, and she was almost certainly behind the decision to include half-tone and line drawings by John

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Craxton. Three images survived when the book appeared, in 1957, in a popular John Murray version. It was the last Leigh Fermor hardback not to wear a Craxton jacket. Joan saw to that.

For almost two years Joan and Paddy lived at the Ghika house while Paddy wrote most of what became his 1958 masterpiece, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese. John attended readings of the emerging text and added thoughts and experiences to the editing process. As he enthused in a letter to the publisher, John Murray, Paddy ‘imparts the essence of poetry into his prose, gives the reader very clear images, evoked – not described, result one never tires of rereading’.3 He gave the book its distinctive blue and yellow cover, anchored with a cluster of the fortified tower houses of the Mani peninsula, where warring families sought protection from invaders and neighbours. These formidable dwellings look out over the rippling Aegean. Land and sea are then overseen by the gigantic eye of Divine Providence as woven into the flag of Hydra, protecting the Greeks in their battle for freedom. First seen painted on the prows of Hydriot fishing boats, John copied it for the Daphnis and Chloë pirate ship. Now the all-seeing eye is a symbol for the sun and the enlightenment of life in Greece. More and more light seeped into the pictures of an increasingly linear painter. He was working on a huge canvas provisionally titled Three Figures and Setting Sun, where he sought to encapsulate his deepest feelings about the temperament of Greece. The dates of sustained labour recorded in the pigment are 1952–6 and 1958 – 9. In fact he carried on revising this picture until it featured in his 1967 retrospective exhibition in London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery. After that he abandoned it as a failure. The first in what became a series of Craxton easel-blockers featured three figures on the swimming platform in the Spilia rocks beside Hydra harbour, with the view across the Saronic Gulf to mainland mountains. Each figure in a trinity of young Greek men was contained in his own mythology and iconography. Staring out of the canvas from an early stage, a squatting naval conscript drew languidly on a cigarette. Beside him, as if to emphasis his roots in the land, was a basket of market trader’s fruit. Dominant on the left part of the panel, a fisherman rose on steps from the sea brandishing an octopus, to be dashed on stone before the carcass was hung up and stretched out in the sun prior to cooking. John loved

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painting octopus fishers, whether solo divers or paired boatmen. Here was the apotheosis of them all – an emblem of humanity in the highest state of being: living with and from nature, golden in sunshine and the glory of youth. Less noticeable at first, but actually claiming much of the scene, a third figure reclined in foreground shadows. He covered his face – a gesture perhaps owing more to sorrow than shading from the sun, since he was mostly in the dark though still outlined in light. A weight-bearing leg was bent at the knee; the other lay casually or uselessly extended with an idle foot on which he might no longer be able to walk. After staying at the Ghika house with Joan and Paddy, Isabel Lambert wrote that it had been ‘stunning watching the sponge divers’.4 John never spoke of their work let alone depicted it, although they were his friends, companions and possible lovers from harbourside bars. He adored their wildness. It came from having more free time and cash to fritter than other Greek labourers, but also from deeper desperation. Sponge fishermen dived to great depths and came up so quickly that some never made it to the surface alive. The bends, striking with apparent randomness, might kill or twist a diver’s leg so that the limb would never work again. Hydra in the

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Two Figures and Setting Sun, 1952– 67 Oil on canvas, 122 × 244 cm. John Craxton Estate

1950s held handsome cripples. Safety equipment was available even then, but divers viewed mechanical assistance as an assault on their manhood and on their innate belief in bravado. They were hooked on the Mediterranean equivalent of Russian roulette. John hated it – just as he could enjoy a bullfight only if there was no risk of the bull being harmed. So the horizontal figure suggests one of the last of Hydra’s sponge-divers – whose ancient, perilous profession was vanishing due to over-fishing, a virus rendering stocks off the African coast unexploitable and the advent of cheap synthetic alternatives. Many Craxton paintings are studies in opposites, and the contrast in this picture became more acute when the squatting sailor, along with his basket of fruit, was deleted. Two Figures and Setting Sun, as shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, has the octopus catcher waving his prize of life and light at the supine figure in the shadows – the tentacles resembling the multi-headed Hydra serpent of Greek mythology, or the Medusa head with snakes instead of hair whose gorgon gaze turned living beings to stone. As John said, his pictures comment on life but implicitly – he felt his art would be diminished by deciphering. Two Figures and Setting Sun is most

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of all a study in light. The black-centred sun like an eyeball sends out shafts and beams in mottled, fractured and repeated colour. Sea and sky are delineated by brilliant pigment running in channels and broken into angular planes defining brightness and shade. The human figure is now outlined in double or triple lines – one hand and forearm of the prostrated sponge-diver lit up in green, red and white. Such a structural device, lending luminosity and vitality to the picture, echoes the terraced landscapes of rural Greece, but still more the fierce light of the Aegean. Light is refracted at the edges of brightly backlit objects to produce a fringe of colours around them – like a rainbow halo. Scientist and art critic Keith Roberts says: Most of the time we are conditioned not to notice this; indeed, it is not easy to see with the naked eye, but I think Craxton could. The thin polychromatic lines around the strongly backlit subjects in his paintings may well have emerged in part because of his ability to notice.5 Some have ascribed mind-altering drugs to the psychedelic colours and broken boundaries in Craxton’s Greek paintings from this period onwards, but he used only alcohol, tobacco and cannabis. As he wrote to Joan and Paddy from London in the summer of 1966: ‘Everyone seems to be on LSD really interesting people dont need it … all one gets is very uninteresting descriptions of its effects…’. He hated any inhibitor to conversation. Anyhow, the highly experimental picture that is Two Figures and Setting Sun assisted the delivery of many subsequent successes. After its 1967 showing, the prototype was deemed too flawed to leave the studio – and, in the end, even to look at. It was consigned to a mezzanine store in the Kidderpore Avenue music room for the last four decades of the painter’s life. There, hidden behind stacked chairs, it was found by David Attenborough and Hilary Spurling, during the filming of a Craxton profile for BBC2’s The Culture Show in 2011, and finally appreciated. Now landscape architect Kim Wilkie has named Two Figures and Setting Sun as his favourite picture: Landscape, for me, is more about light, sound and stories than appearance. You really can hear, smell and taste this painting. The vibrating patterns are mesmerising; they root a fleeting moment in a timeless place. The setting sun pulses, the motion in the waves and figures is slowly rhythmic and the mountains float on the horizon. I have stared at the painting for hours and it just draws you in deeper. It drifts into your imagination.6

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NEW MUSE

Nico Ghika was a mobile metropolitan. He and John often met in Athens and London. When they teamed up in Paris, in 1952, although Nico had lived so long in the French capital, John was able to plot an introduction to Dora Maar by taking him to Le Catalan restaurant. No longer with Picasso and no longer a photographer, Dora was taking a break from her painter’s studio in the company of her sculptor friend Alberto Giacometti. Nico was staying with Joan in London when, early in 1958, he had a fateful encounter with one of her friends. Barbara Hutchinson was a restless grand bohemian with roots in the Bloomsbury Group. Her mother, Mary – socialite Jinny in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves – modelled for Matisse. Having been married to Victor Rothschild, Barbara was now estranged from her second husband, Rex Warner. The meeting of Barbara and Nico was a lightning strike for both parties. Soon they were together in the Far East in what was effectively an elopement. Their happiness was hard-won for themselves and others; but, long after the deaths of both partners, Barbara’s brother likened her to a buffeted boat that sailed into safe harbour on meeting Nico Ghika.1 Known to his intimates as The Pasha, due to an air of dignified authority, Nico treated Barbara like a queen. His Athens house, in Kriezotou Street – eventually to be shared rather awkwardly with Tiggie, the first Mrs Ghika – was beautified via a modernist transformation with echoes of shared aesthetic delights during initial travels in Asia. They also had a

Nico, John, Barbara, Paddy and Joan on the terrace of the Ghika house, Hydra, by Roloff Beny, 1958

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London base in Little Venice; but their palace was on Hydra. John said: ‘The once austere house had been made by Barbara at last into a comfortable home; for years it had been only a summer retreat, but now it was heated and splendidly furnished.’ 2 The splendour of the furnishings owed more than a little to John’s talent for interior design. In an Athens shop he and Barbara found a suite of painted, shell-shaped furniture, made in Venice around 1800, and embellished with silver leaf and carved dolphins, plus a mirror framed with crabs, seahorses and dragons. It was all shipped to Hydra by caique then carried to the Ghika house on a donkey train. While Nico and Barbara were in London and Paris, John was asked to supervise planting of the new Hydra terraces. He was told how to acquire, place and water-in orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit and quince trees, with hundreds of box cuttings below them, and a plan was drawn for the precise positioning of pistachio trees and hibiscus bushes. Herb beds were envisaged below the dining-room window. Nico added: ‘Charmian promised a lot of cuttings of different things especially roses and climbing plants which you could put anywhere you like.’3 Back in London John worked on Greek pictures in the Clifton Hill studio and added Greekified decorations to Kidderpore Avenue. Strips of lining material were painted with friezes of cats, crayfish and green-man faces and fig leaves, then wound into lampshades. A hole in the bathroom wall was plugged with a big panel combining two favourite Craxton motifs of the past decade – boy on a wall and girl waving a scarf. The 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight was based on Billy Moss’s book about the Kreipe kidnap. Riding his motorbike to Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, John helped with communications, linguistic and musical, between soundtrack composer Mikis Theodorakis – also treated to several Craxton family lunches – and director Michael Powell. There was work to do in communicating the Greekness of a movie shot on location in the Alpes-Maritime department of France. The film maker bought Craxton pictures, hanging the painting Still Life with Cat and Child – the still life a table of seafood – in his Voile d’Or hotel in the fishing port of Saint-JeanCap-Ferrat between Nice and Monte Carlo. That was a good excuse for an epicurean artist to take a considerable detour for a delectable meal. The pair discussed collaborating on a screen version of The Tempest. John imagined an island in the style of Hieronymus Bosch but concluded – as he had done with Freddie Ashton – that the Shakespearean drama worked only as a stage play. In the spring of 1958 John paid a third visit to the Scilly Isles, this time in the company of two athletic academics. One was the American Reynolds Price – scariest of all Stephen Spender’s swains for Natasha, since most threatening to the Spender marriage. The other was a central European intellectual en route to becoming an English academic. They shared the attic of the Locke family’s

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Still Life with Cat and Child, 1959 Tempera on board, 122 × 100.5 cm. Tate

new house on Tresco. A rota was devised for the single and double beds, with all the amorous possibilities that might entail. Sharing badinage, they gorged on five meals a day: breakfast, elevenses, lunch, high tea and supper of the daily fishing catch. One afternoon Mr Locke brought a bucket of anchovies for his wife to cook and mash into a buttery paste and serve on home-made bread. It was just the sort of light-hearted and physically open adventure John Craxton loved. Again he responded to the appeal of island landscapes looking so much like Greece. Returning to Oxford, Reynolds Price hosted a dinner party for the visiting W.H. Auden, with two other guests: John Craxton and Spud Murphy. Wystan

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and Reynolds were bowled over by Spud, with his stories of Irish guardsmen turning tricks to boost income and relieve boredom. Their favourite saga involved a visiting American theatre director who picked Spud up for sex and then introduced him to his wife, with whom the happy hooker was soon also on intimate terms. He assumed secrecy on both sides, until invited to the couple’s hotel suite for a farewell dinner and presentation of gifts. There was humour in Spud’s racy tales, with human understanding and affection too. He had a helpful nature and an unusual amount of experience for 21 years of life. Reynolds visited the Craxton home and studio in London, and was a perceptive admirer of the art: On that first visit, John … showed me dozens of small and inexplicably economical portrait sketches of Greeks whom he met briefly in cafés and wherever else, young men who (not entirely Westernized) could easily have stepped from Homer’s battle scenes, the somber tragedies of Aeschylus, or even the raucous ithyphallic comedies of Aristophanes – their adamant dignity and craving for life was still that firmly intact and vividly conveyed in a few pencil lines. My first turn through John’s sketchbooks was among my earliest experiences of the true collector’s longing – at once, I wanted almost all of these drawings.4 John was working on winter and summer panorama designs in a mural competition for London’s Morley College. They included observed figures and vignettes that had been obsessing him since his arrival on Poros: girl waving scarf; child carried on shoulders; infant with cat; taverna musician, dancer and diners; goats; harvesters; sleeping sailor; bathers on beach; boy on wall. These images now combined in friezes of farewell to his first Greek island. Narrowly beaten by Martin Froy in the Morley College contest, he had at least been promised a fee of ‘not less than 50 guineas’ for scale designs if unsuccessful. The judges thought John and Robert Medley’s proposals so pleasing that they pledged to pursue further commissions; but hopeful words led nowhere. John Craxton, a natural painter of frescoes, would never create a Greek mural. He continued working through the featured themes in paintings, trying to perfect each image by reinventing his technique with every fresh attempt. The evolution of the picture in progress could resemble an assault course as the path to its making was changed and then changed again to overcome obstacles and avoid dead-ends. The work was likely to be not so much finished as abandoned on an exhibition deadline. Pleasure exuding from each painting concealed the struggle in its making. In August 1958 there was another delightful detour – this time to the ancient ruined town of Les-Baux-de-Provence, on a rocky outcrop near Arles. Like Minton and Ayrton before him, John wanted to see a place of importance to the Neo-Romantic artist Eugene Berman. He was even keener on dinner at the fabled Baumanière restaurant – telling Janet:

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Five Goats, 1959 Tempera and Polyfilla on board, 121.9 × 149.4 cm. Private collection

… the food was fabulous. I didn’t dare look but I felt the bill was too! but what an incredible place the ruined town is. Aix was nice except that it came down in one huge deluge. they seem crazy mad at the beauty of the landscape must say it doesn’t begin to compare with Greece. In London, through Barbara, John now found a key friend. From a grand Washington and Boston family, Agnes Magruder was named Magouche (‘little mighty one’) by the Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky when they met in New York in 1941, when she was 19. She gradually learned that his entire life story was a fabrication, perhaps because the facts were too terrible. Their marriage was fraught with his studio fire, car crash and cancer; her fall down stairs and infidelity: all before his suicide. Then she wed and parted from the Bostonian painter Jack Phillips, taking two daughters from each union – and gathering up more, virtually adopted children in her graceful stride – to roam abroad. ‘Mummy was like a character from a Henry James novel’, said her daughter Maro Gorky. ‘We rented beautiful houses in Italy, Spain, France then England and met hordes of interesting people. She loved to have a changing

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backdrop and a cast of thousands.’5 Zestful, astute and sexy, and with a gravelly East Coast accent deepened by cigarettes, she was known as Magouche; even the pronunciation sounded like a seduction. She said:

Magouche walking

Johnny was adorable. My four daughters worshipped him and he was like a kid himself. He was round all the time; everybody had a ride on his motorbike. He liked to be a performer, but he wasn’t a show-off; in many ways, he was quite shy. He helped me with every house – he told me about cornicing and went with me to buy it; he told me I didn’t need curtains, just to dig out the shutters that had been plastered in. He was very practical and knew where to find good things for very little. He gave so generously of his time and his taste: much more give than take.6

With Barbara busy in London, Nico invited John to Hydra for the Christmas of 1959; they went for Christmas lunch with the Johnstons, the party bolstered by a lethally alcoholic punch. He stayed on, with a studio in the Ghika house while the whole building became a canvas shared with his host. Partners in painting and decoration, John and Nico toiled to give Barbara the perfect New Year present. They were still working when Easter had come and gone: As a tribute to Barbara, the main bedroom was painted all over with panels of obscure, arcane ciphers, richly decorated patterns of false marbling. It looked magnificent. With my help, the woodwork was embellished, the dining room reminding one of an atrium of a villa in Pompeii. Chests and tables were decorated, and … there was more than a suggestion of palace.7 The palatial analogy was not lost on John when revisiting Knossos in June 1960. He sent Nico a postcard: ‘Do you know that those Minoans were doing marbling

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Nico and Barbara Ghika with cabinet and wall painted by Craxton and Ghika, Hydra, 1957

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John Craxton, Hydra, by Wolfgang Suschitzky, 1960

3000 before J.C.! And N.G. too. I’ve pinched a bit of the red plaster from the throne room of the Palace to show you.’ Wolfgang Suschitzky, the Austrian-raised and London-based documentary photographer and cinematographer, who had worked on the 1956 Oscarwinning short film The Bespoke Overcoat and would later shoot Get Carter (1971), spent three weeks of his 104 years in Greece. In that tiny 1960 window he made a film for BP on Skiathos, after meeting John in Athens and going with him to Hydra – taking his camera wherever he went. John was shown sketching, with a Roman ring on one finger. The Ghikas were depicted – most hauntingly, as it turned out, in a distant shot of an impregnable-looking house, where the artist appears with his consort as an insignificant speck on a giant terrace, like a captain standing on the deck of a great white ship over which he has no control.

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The Ghika house, Hydra, by Wolfgang Suschitzky, 1960

Down in the harbour bars, tensions were mounting among ex-pats dreaming of fame and fortune, or at least of a cheque to keep the party afloat. The sun did not always shine on Hydra. Winter storms could rage for days or weeks – times of turbulence when lanes were awash, winds and waves lashed the quay and boats could not berth. Communication with the outside world was cut and food supplies ran low. Then cornered writers and painters might fight like ferrets in a sack. When the sun returned it could be merciless – exposing every frustration, flaw and failure. From 1955, when John’s friend Michael Cacoyannis brought the actors Ellie Lambeti and Dimitris Horn to Hydra to film A Girl in Black, the island became a recurring film set and glossy magazine feature. Creative pioneers were followed by the moneyed and leisured, who threatened to kill the thing they loved by raising its profile and prices. Tourists began to flock and wealthy Athenians to buy the romantic ruins and displace the artists from the business of finding or wrecking themselves. In May 1959, Babis Morres opened the Lagoudera Marine Club in an old shop, with candles when motor-generated lights failed but always with a flash for his camera to snap every celebrity. Images given to newspapers in Athens wooed ever-larger waves of jet-setters. Charmian Clift and George Johnston were more gifted than most of the artistic exiles steadily going to pieces, but even more self-destructive. They were at the Katsikas bar from noon until late in the evening, drowning in alcohol as a drugs culture dawned. Inebriation, impotence, infidelity; the Johnstons battled all three, and each other. Charmian spent much of her working time improving George’s prose. Professional and private jealousies swirled between and around them. Punier artistic talents withered:

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Perhaps their stomachs weren’t strong enough, perhaps their gifts were weighed and found wanting, or perhaps that little private income, the remittance, made it all too easy to put off until tomorrow the actual hard work that might be involved in being the new young prophet. And now, when they are no longer really young, and Europe is stale old ground, it is too late for them to begin and too late for them to go back. So they go round and round and round, treading the same old beaten track…8 Charmian Clift was in her mid-thirties when she wrote those acutely observed lines, and George Johnston over a decade older. By the close of the 1950s John Craxton was 37 and, though spared the Aegean Blues and the burning up of tender talent in fierce sunlight, he was less famous than he had been in his twenties. He had lost the novelty of prodigious youth and the art world had lost interest in him. On regular visits to England he was still in amiable contact with Lucian Freud, but Lucian – as licentious as John in sexual relationships if not more so – was exclusive in friendship. Wanting to focus on one fellow artist, he required someone readily to hand. He found the confidant he needed in Francis Bacon, a fellow London-centric lover of low life. Although dissimilar in many ways, they remained as the twin titans of figurative art in Britain amid a brave new world of American-led abstraction. John said simply: ‘Lucian began to drop me when he found a better painter.’ In April 1960 two hopeful young artists caught the ferry from Piraeus to Hydra – one in search of himself, the other looking for John Craxton. The first, a published poet and would-be novelist from Montreal, was called Leonard Cohen. The second was fledgling English painter Christopher Mason. Both fell promptly and inevitably into the orbit of Charmian and George. Leonard remained there, soon as the lover of Norwegian Marianne Ihlen, the muse for his first songs. There is a story that he made his way to the Ghika house but was turned away by the housekeeper. He and John certainly mingled on friendly terms in Hydra’s few bars and tavernas that spring and early summer. Too shy to call on John unannounced, Christopher rented a flea-infested cottage and began to draw and keep watch on the harbour. Finally they met and Christopher found the courage to issue an invitation for a studio visit over a glass of raki. John liked the art and the artist. At the Ghika house Christopher was surprised to see his hero painting walls and furniture. Impressive images were semi-mapped in the room serving as the Craxton studio – most notably long panoramas of Hydra drawing on Byzantine art and Nico Ghika and promising a new line of distinction; but none appeared to be advancing very far. An artist needing the distillation of distance was too close to his subject. Plus, a lotus-eating diet was poor fuel for any work ethic.

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Six years younger than John, Christopher had a grander but far less confident background by way of Eton College, the Coldstream Guards and Chelsea School of Art. Swiss and French on his mother’s side, he had been living as an artist in Paris with a parental allowance. Good-natured, goodlooking and well-connected, his diffidence came from active but covert homosexuality, that had nearly got him expelled from Eton. He narrowly avoided exposure in the trial of Lord Montagu, whose portrait he had been painting and whose parties he had been attending. The peer paid the £50 fee for the picture when released from jail. Seeking out John Craxton in Greece was the most daring act of Christopher Mason’s life. John and Christopher never had a physical relationship but paired with sailors on shared taverna outings. Once there was a furious scene, with John hurling invective in demotic Greek, when a naval conscript demanded money from Christopher. Sexual tourism by gay men was increasing around the Mediterranean, but for John Craxton physical engagement was not to be tainted by financial transaction. He might pick up the bar tab for the evening, but any ensuing liaison entailed freedom on both sides. Liberated from guilt, furtiveness and any sense of exploitation, he insisted on equality in his private life. This philosophy was underpinned by the practical fact that he lived on a pittance. John took the lead in artistic, social and sexual matters. But the younger man now played a decisive role with his conviction that, for a serious artist, Hydra was a beautiful trap. John needed a base of his own, but where? Much as he loved the marbled port city of Ermoupoli on Syros, he pictured a Cretan studio above the harbour at Chania. Christopher seized the initiative and bought ferry tickets.

Landscape, Hydra, 1960 Tempera on board, 66.7 × 120.7 cm. Arts Council Collection, South Bank Centre, London

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In June 1960 John and Christopher crossed on the night boat from Piraeus to Herakleion. Settling down to sleep on the deck beneath colourful blankets bought in an Athens market, they were plied with wine, olives and sex. After looking at Knossos they caught the bus to Chania and booked into what had been the Hotel Grand Angleterre and was now the Plaza. Happily for two adventurers, standards had shifted. Sharing their room with five sailors met in a nearby taverna, they roistered until dawn. The ungrand hotel stood on the harbour amid general decrepitude. German bombs had hit hard; but, next door, the former Mosque of the Janissaries – shock troops of the Ottoman empire – had lost its minaret and graveyard in acts of Greek desecration once worshippers were expelled months after John’s birth. For all the remaining Ottoman touches, waterfront buildings were mostly Venetian – though a minaret-style lighthouse dated from a brief spell of Egyptian rule. Many Chaniots saw the decaying harbour as a symbol of subjugation and few cared to live there. If there had been any money around, history would have been bulldozed. The social and commercial pulse had moved to the new town beyond the Venetian walls – Crete’s 1913 union with Greece being marked by the construction of a huge cross-shaped covered market that pointedly flattened one historic entrance gate. Battered taxis waited beside donkey-carts, balls of jasmine dangling from drivers’ mirrors. The scent mingled with tobacco smoke as the unifying aroma of Chania. Against the hubbub in newer districts, the old town had a stillness broken only by shrieking swifts.

above: Drawing of Chania harbour on letter to Joan Leigh Fermor, 1960

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For John Craxton and kindred spirits, Chania exuded the open and internationalist exoticism of a Greek Tangier. Ottoman authority on the island had ended in 1898 when the Great Powers granted semi-autonomy under high commissioner Prince George of Greece, Marie Bonaparte’s husband. British, French, German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Italian consular buildings had then risen among the neoclassical houses of the city fathers in a 15-year contest of grandeur and spectacle. The nearby deep berths of Souda Bay brought waves of gorgeously uniformed naval forces from many nations – a seductive feature of Chania for John Craxton now that Souda was a NATO base. After breakfast John and Christopher looked for a place to rent. In a street behind the harbour they heard that an empty house might be available. By lunchtime John had agreed to lease for £7 a month one end of a dilapidated palazzo, a verbal contract sealed with a handshake. A tall, thin, four-floored building had harbour views and room enough for two studios if the occupants shared one bedroom. Joan would meet all expenses. Back on Hydra, Christopher spent a month arranging the removal, until they reached Chania on 19 July. The street door of Moschon 1 opened into a tiny internal courtyard, with two stone steps down to the basement and five up to the kitchen and the heart of the house. A wooden cupboard covered a former doorway lost when a palazzo became a warren. Rickety stairs led to a landing with French doors on to a terrace where previous occupants had kept chickens. On the second floor there was a cool and tranquil bedroom at the back and a high-ceilinged salon at the front – the first Craxton studio – with more French doors on to a balcony. Christopher was to paint in the room covering the top floor, with a Turkish wooden overhang to the rear and a front terrace looking out to the Cretan Sea and the often snow-wrapped White Mountains. Moschon is a short, L-shaped street of subdivided Venetian houses, with an arched entrance to the former palazzo of the Renier family – the clan providing one of the last doges of Venice – at the heel. The arch is inscribed in Latin with a challenging example to any creative labourer: ‘Our sweet father suffered, achieved and studied much, and toiled and perspired. May eternal peace cover him. 1608. Ides of January 9’. Opposite the Craxton front door, a small sixteenth-century barrel-vaulted building with traces of wall paintings was the Renier chapel dedicated to St Nicholas, giver of gifts. Further along the street, what is now the Porto del Colombo Hotel was once the tallest building in Venetian Chania (1205–1669). Occupied by senior officials under Ottoman rule (1669–1898), it briefly housed the French Embassy and was then home to the Cretan revolutionary leader Eleftherios Venizelos until he left to become Prime Minister of Greece in 1910. Talking of prime ministers, even before unpacking Christopher wrote cryptically to his mother: John C and I arrived in Crete yesterday with 21 pieces of luggage, mostly boxes of paint and two great easels … our journey was great fun, overnight 4th class on the deck with a crowd of Cretan peasants, chickens and goats,

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everyone sharing food and wine. In the morning we arrived and found a lorry to take all our stuff. Our first evening was rather social. Snobbish and squeamish, Mrs Mason was being spared details of what else had been shared on the boat. The grand dame was to be left incredulous by events of the following night. John and Christopher had been instructed to meet a launch at Souda, from which stepped Margot Fonteyn, actor-director Alexis Minotis and others in formal evening dress. Part of a cruise party on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht Christina O, they were off to a restaurant dinner for the guest of honour: Winston Churchill. Embracing John, Margot insisted that he and his friend were invited – brushing aside the absence of jackets and ties. John already knew Eleftherios Venizelos’s son Sophocles, himself a former Greek Prime Minister still linked to Chania. He was attending the Churchill dinner, together with other politicians and resistance veterans who were to present the war leader with a dagger inscribed ‘To The Father Of Victory’. Sophocles had said that John and Christopher could join them. Margot herself was by now a startling choice of cruising companion for the democratic world’s elder statesman. The father and grandfather of her husband, Tito, had been elected Panamanian presidents. Tito – gambler, womaniser, bootlegger and alleged brothel-keeper – was in more of a hurry. In 1959 both partners had been implicated in a Cuban-backed coup attempt (he fled, she was arrested). She bought his guns. Her life had become as incredible as the most far-fetched ballet story; her art remained out of this world. John said: Margot thought Tito had money, and Tito wanted Margot to think that he had money because he gave her quite expensive presents which turned her head I think in many ways. But he was … a kind of entrepreneur using her in order to further his own career. That’s all.1 Having retired from the House of Commons the previous summer, and lately laid low by jaundice, Sir Winston looked all of his 85 years. Indeed, he seemed barely awake at the dinner party in his honour. Taking the seat opposite, John

Churchill and Craxton chatting over dinner, Crete, 1960

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thought him the image of the Graham Sutherland portrait seen in photos (‘the Francis Bacon body was a little over the top, but the head was marvellous’). Having just visited Charles de Gaulle, Sir Winston began speaking French – although this had been the language of the Greek elite, it implied a wandering mind. But he was instantly alert when John said: ‘I’m a painter, Sir. Like you.’ The winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize for Literature had also beaten Hitler at painting. Largely self-taught, Churchill began tackling oil landscapes during the First World War, mentored by William Nicholson. He painted with impressionistic verve – declaring: ‘We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box. And for this Audacity is the only ticket.’2 With a penchant for bright and vibrant colours, he particularly loved to paint the Mediterranean: Every country where the sun shines and every district in it, has a theme of its own … the painter wanders and loiters contentedly from place to place, always on the look out for some brilliant butterfly of a picture which can be caught and set up and carried safely home.3 The Churchill-Craxton art chat was animated and abruptly terminated. They were planning a sketching trip when the unexpected guest was unseated by a jealous worthy and despatched down-table. Here he found himself next to Clementine Churchill. Now tipsy, he could not resist quizzing her on the Sutherland portrait, commissioned as an 80th birthday gift, which Sir Winston was known to hate. Lodged in Churchill’s care for the sitter’s lifetime, until passing to the Palace of Westminster on his death, it had not been seen for some time. Lady Churchill said they had liked the painter but felt badly let down by the painting. ‘Why not arrange a little fire?’ asked John wittily. ‘Oh, Mr Craxton!’ the consort giggled. ‘Really!’ Late in life, John said: ‘I was doing the Chinese thing of paying the doctor while you’re well. I wanted to ward off disaster.’ When the story broke that the portrait had been burned, he was horrified to think he had supplied an incendiary idea – then relieved to learn that the picture had been reduced to ashes, on Lady Churchill’s orders, before the Cretan dinner. ‘If only the gardener had just cut out the head with a razorblade’, he lamented. The mayor of Chania had been seated at the end of the Churchill table. When John told him where he was living the official condemned ‘an old Turkish relic full of rats’. He planned to knock down this symbol of Greek humiliation and fill in the harbour with the rubble. The resulting piazza would be empty save for a statue of himself. ‘He was about 90, thank God, and he died fairly soon afterwards’, John said. The night after the Churchill dinner, John and Christopher began a taverna life. The harbour had a sailors’ den called The Crabs, its owner lately released from a labour camp. Here musicians played the Cretan lyra – a three-stringed bowed instrument descended from the Minoan cithara. Until recently each player had made his own lyra, usually from mulberry and with a sounding board of cypress or Lebanese cedar from the beams of old Venetian houses. John brought food to cook in the kitchen – the best a rare fish called skaros, eaten guts and all, procured only

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above: Chania Harbour by John Donat, 1961 Christopher Mason and John Craxton in a Cretan taverna

at dawn in the market. He loved the fact that a live fish was trailed in the water and those coming to chase it away were then netted – a method used since ancient times. Cretan wine was decanted from wooden barrels into cans of coloured tin. John aired a theory about his favourite, from the Malvasia grape. He believed it had originated in Malevezi vineyards near Herakleion, with vines then taken to Madeira, where the wine was called Malmsey. All the sailors in The Crabs drank and sang and danced, and some were taken home. Christopher said: John had one special sailor, or two, but not at the same time. John was faithful to one guy, would draw him, paint him and make love to him. He never got bored with people; he would never be nasty or dismiss a sailor. It ended when they moved on. John would then find another fairly quickly.4 Like the cats he adopted – the first a ginger kitten, thrown into the harbour in a stone-weighted sack, named Scuriasmenos after the Greek word for ‘rusty’ – John Craxton had a genius for making himself at home. In a crumbling Ottoman courtyard behind his house and below a palm tree, he befriended the residents

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of a vaulted cave. Kostas Klinakis had taken very early retirement as a boatman to sit and smoke, and son George had a similarly leisurely outlook. Sultana, matriarch and maid, was an artist in her darkened kitchen. John paid her so that he and Christopher and other friends could join and enhance the family table. They bought crockery and furniture and salvaged architectural features dumped in the street. John was a perfectionist, keen in theory to re-create every correct historical detail, while content in practice to live in a building site. His preoccupation was painting in a life of pleasure and a palimpsest of past and present. ‘I like living on a dung-heap’, he said. ‘I love the idea of thousands of people underneath the house.’ 5 His Ottomanised Venetian house almost certainly overlaid older Byzantine, Arab and Hellenic habitations. Below the basement there was probably a Minoan building. From the cellar with a cold water tap and commode covering a malodorous hole in the floor, right up to the leaking roof, the Moschon house required rescue. A lavatory was installed, along with a shower cubicle complete with a Mondrianstyle floor of marble pieces. Above an old hamam sink, an eighteenth-century Ottoman marble fountain back was carved with a phoenix bathing in the water of rebirth, flanked by cypresses growing from stone vessels as emblems of new life. In the emerging kitchen a cooker stood in a recast Turkish fireplace. Slowly floors were relaid, walls repaired, broken tiles and rafters replaced. Much as John appreciated the traditional skills of Cretan workmen, he also liked labourers as models and any becoming taverna visitor might become a lodger in return for lending a hand. Two Americans staying on these terms caused an early rumpus. They shared a courtyard dinner at Sultana’s, serenaded by a canary in a cage hanging on a wall, above a luxuriant garden sprouted from fallen seed. There were screams next morning when the lady of the house discovered that the mystery greenery had been gathered in the night. Around that time John found cannabis leaves drying on his roof terrace. Ever pragmatic, he smoked the haul with the robbers. One pressing task was a letter of thanks to his benefactor (p. 263). He filled the top of the page with the outer arm of the harbour, with its boatyard and lighthouse, then added words where water should be: Very dear Joan, Here I am at last in my favourite town & in my favourite island. With a recklessness inspired by your generosity I have rented this empty house in the old harbour of Xania with this view from my window. The other side of the house looks towards a ruined chapel… The upper part of the house is taken by another painter, a very nice person. We escaped from Hydra together, and what a relief to get away … despite the ravishing atmosphere of Nico’s house, the poisonous self conscious spirit of the place was getting me down, those hordes of expatriate coffee shop sitters

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all the numerous scandals & intrigues seep into one & dislocate ones powers of concentration. Crete is a country in its own right & the landscape full of new ideas, forms – shapes & colours. The people of Xania are incredibly kind & helpfull & I feel very happy here. I have told the Plaza Hotel that when they rebuild this autumn if they dont keep the ironwork intact I will never recommend them to anyone so they have promised to be good. There is some attempt to preserve the old walls of the town as they become revealed when houses are pulled down as they are made of the Greek temples of ancient Kydonia … the place is full of large Venetian houses some only a shell, perhaps the reason I like it all is that no one has attempted to restore or bother about them – they just crumble away.6 Beyond architecture and archaeology, Crete was rich in myth and mystery. John saw a fruitful omen early on, when an owl landed on a Chania balcony with a snake in its beak. There were ghosts in the shadows. Greeks owned the fishing boats but often hired ‘Egyptians’ to work them – African migrants whose exit ports had generally been in Egypt. Slave markets had operated on Crete until the 1890s, and freed African slaves were deported to Turkey in 1923 as Muslims. Fisherman Salis Chelidonakis, reputedly the last Ottoman slave in Chania, defied history to continue living in a room on the harbour near John’s house. Perhaps Sudanese, he secretly delivered provisions to needy people who might baulk at help from a black Muslim. When he died, in 1967, he was buried in an Orthodox cemetery for his charity. For all the attractions beyond – and the acquisition of a motorbike – the studio was the centre of John’s existence. Crete appealed in part because no other painter had been linked to the island in modern times. The last visiting artist of note had been Edward Lear in 1864 – for a seven-week traipse through tough terrain during which he had moaned about weather, food and vermin, while making hundreds of sketches. One view across Chania harbour to the mosque was drawn from the Moschon house.

Canea, 4.30pm May 26 1864, Edward Lear Sepia ink and watercolour, 13.5 × 21 cm. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Gennadius Library

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The two friends trekked to White Mountain villages where John was greeted like a returning son. After freely flowing food and wine, and talking long into the night, they slept under blankets on a floor or roof. One morning, Christopher woke with a violent headache as a granny handed him a glass of raki for breakfast. He told his mother that Craxton tours were not for the faint-hearted. Fascinated by the medieval churches of western Crete, John went to great lengths to savour them – and save them. Although many were semi-ruined, Alikambos held a complete chapel with frescoes signed by Ioannis Pagomenos in 1316. Here was an influence on El Greco and John Craxton, but inspirational images were obscured by a thick, dark, greasy film from centuries of olive-oil lamps and beeswax candles. While Christopher was following John’s lead in applying soap and water to aid visibility, they were apprehended by outraged villagers. Two alleged vandals ended in court – where, as Christopher recalled: John suggested that I should be the one to answer the charge while he acted as counsel for the defence. It soon became clear that we had done no damage and had acted strictly in the interests of Cretan heritage. I ended up being complimented by the magistrate.1 In The Crabs that November they had a chance meeting with John Donat, an architect and photographer who was in Greece to stave off a nervous breakdown. The son of Oscar-winning actor Robert Donat already knew every other Craxton, since their families were next-door neighbours in Kidderpore Avenue. Fearful that a priceless legacy of iconography might vanish before being documented, John had found the collaborator he needed – with professionalism proven by a Hasselblad camera. Together they travelled to Byzantine chapels and monasteries from Kouneni in the west to Kritsa in the east, walking through the Aradaina Gorge (John’s favourite Cretan ravine) to Agios Ioannis and snapping landscapes and portraits en route. John Craxton told only part of the story when he said: Our improvised method was to use the afternoon sun as it entered the west doors, put sheets of paper down to reflect the light and add double flashlights. All the heavy equipment was carried by hand up the rough tracks.2

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When John Donat returned for a second documentary trip, in 1961, while the other John was absent, he too was arrested. Adopting the Craxton formula of wetting painted surfaces to improve visibility, he had been advised by a Chania chemist to use diluted household detergent that would not react with lime. Cue further local fury and then another court appearance for defacing ancient monuments. The judge who acquitted him applauded his work; but he, too, had learned that following John Craxton meant courting controversy. He relished the risky path of self-discovery – writing in 1999: When I had returned from that second journey in 1961 I still didn’t know whether I was an architect or a photographer, but I knew one thing forever: I would never be an employee again. I would be my own man … Crete had set me free.3 Osbert Lancaster was guided through Crete during 20-year researches for what became Sailing to Byzantium, a 1969 illustrated companion to Byzantine sites from Italy to Istanbul. In John’s copy he added to the acknowledgements page ‘and Mr John Craxton who revealed so much in Crete I should never have found for myself, and who insisted and proved that a hire-car could go where his motor-cycle went’. John and Osbert saw churches ‘tucked away in gorges, isolated on forgotten plateaux, seldom of major architectural importance but of which a surprisingly large number have paintings of considerable quality’. The author-artist lauded those at Episkopi, Alikianos, Gortyna (‘exception to the rule that Byzantine churches do not make good ruins’), Potamies and Kritsa. Osbert dated Episkopi to the first Byzantine period (365–824 AD): However, as it is not mentioned in any of the standard works, and at the time of my only visit appeared to be totally deserted, this judgement remains personal. The only human being in sight on that occasion was a small boy, busily chasing a family of rats along the top of the iconostasis, who was not helpful.4 A Craxton annotation retorted: ‘Not strictly true. I was with him.’ Mark Oliver, who had introduced John to El Greco and Picasso’s Guernica, had also given him a Russian icon and he had loved them ever since. He sought them out in museums and churches, adoring most of all the icon

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painters of the Cretan School who, following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, maintained a bridge between the Byzantine tradition and Renaissance Venice: I found an art of portrayal that in its own way achieved a reality and conviction that I had not experienced before; an art which dispensed with chiaroscuro, and paid no heed to Alberti’s rules of perspective … The icon painter’s use of rhythm and colour suggest rather than describe, and for someone who had seen the work that Braque, Picasso and Matisse had been doing 40 years before, my eyes were already attuned.5 Lady Norton – who was to bequeath John a seventeenth-century icon of The Nativity of Christ, by the Cretan Konstantinos Tzanes Bounialis, which he left to the British Museum in her memory – did the artist another good turn. Forced to drop out of a tour to Russia in May 1961, she gave John her ticket. In Moscow he visited George Costakis, who, protected as a Greek national and Canadian Embassy employee, had salvaged Russian abstract art. In a flat crammed with Suprematist and Constructivist masterworks reviled by the Soviet state, one small room was reserved for similarly despised icons. ‘Noticing a Cretan icon among them I greeted it like an old friend’, John said. ‘This room seemed perfectly happy and natural, in an apartment … dedicated to the Russian modern movement.’6 With Russian and Greek icons closely

The Nativity of Christ by Konstantinos Tzanes Bounialis, c.1650–85 Egg tempera, gold and gesso on linen and wood, 44 × 33 cm. British Museum

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connected in Orthodox religion, he loved the fact that a Greek had rescued avant-garde Russian art – and also that the Costakis collection is now spread between museums in Moscow and Salonika. The tour party included Alexander Romanov, great-nephew of the last tsar, and the first member of Russia’s former ruling family to visit the Soviet Union. Also in the group was Lee Miller. John was shocked by the vulnerability of his friend, no longer the fearless war-photographer. He found her in tears because her hotel bedroom had no lock and she was separated from the rest of the party. Depressive and alcoholic by this point, she had long been watched by British security services as a suspected Communist sympathiser. John had only a profound lack of sympathy for a political system based on deceit and paranoia: They lied about everything – they had to so that the people could go on believing in it all. I was walking in Moscow when I heard a service in a little church, so wandered in. It was chock-a-block and just like a service in Greece. There were all ages, including soldiers in uniform. When I told the Intourist guide later, she said it was impossible. Only a few old women still went to religious services, and I must have mistaken those uniforms. While in Moscow he phoned Guy Burgess, hoping to join the flow of visitors to the flat where the defector spy was now rumoured to be drinking himself into oblivion. There was no response, so the caller kept calling. Finally, a voice with a heavy Slav accent answered: ‘He is in Ukraine with a miner.’ Pretending to misunderstand, John said: ‘So that’s why he had to leave England!’ The chase ended when the tour party moved on to Leningrad [St Petersburg] and Kiev: In the Hermitage we saw a guide leading some Russian peasants, and Alexander Romanov – a tall, elegant, very nice man who was shocked by the common language being spoken – listened to what she was saying. When they got to a Picasso picture she said, ‘And here, comrades, notice all the breaks and cuts in the paint. It is clear proof of the breakup of the capitalist system.’ Lee didn’t drink much in Russia, but I did – I drank vodka all the time in angst at the way the Russian people were being kicked about, all the shortages and the drudgery. I behaved like a Russian – that’s what they were doing. People would come up to me when I was walking alone, avid for information, for the truth. In the market at Kiev I found some lovely traditional wooden spoons and brought everyone back to buy some. Then the police turned up, pushed us away and reprimanded the stall-holder for selling wooden spoons to foreigners who would use them as propaganda against Russia. That was the paranoia.

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Owl Tile and brick, height 18 cm. John Craxton Estate

John managed to complete his trip to the USSR without being arrested or deported; but, given his contempt for authority, it could cou be touch and go in Greece. Christopher Mason watched in astonishment Christ when the t Moschon house was searched by two polic policemen after a tip-off that the suspect Englishman was looting antiquities. The tenant had nothing to t hide except mocking disdain – which he di displayed with deadly clarity when the presiding offi o cer pointed to a clay figure of a bird as prooff off criminality. John had constructed the pastiche Athenian and Picassoesque owl from beachcombed pieces of roof tile and ventilation brick, all of recent manufacture. Picking up the witty model and pulling it apart, John said: ‘You see, the bird is made of brick, just like this…’ And then he tapped the policeman’s forehead with the baked fragment. He would pay dearly for that bird-brained jest, having made a mortal enemy. He was also making foes in his stout defence of Venetian and Ottoman Chania – not just from the chauvinistic Hellenist lobby, but from commercial and municipal developers. When he heard that a Venetian barracks was to be demolished for a new road, he was drinking with Betty Ventris and wailing. ‘Send telegrams!’ she said. So he wired ‘Urgent stop destruction of 400-year-old buildings’ to three Athens ministries. There was no reply. ‘But an architect had been sent down to see what all the fuss was about’, John said. ‘He went back to Athens and pushed through a blanket protection order for the old town.’ A friendship now began with Konstantinos Mitsotakis. The grandson of Eleftherios Venizelos’s sister in a family of politicians was first elected as Liberal MP for Chania in 1946, having narrowly escaped execution after capture as a resistance fighter. He and John shared a love of Crete’s antiquities and wild places. Politics, as usual, had nothing to do with it. John grew especially close to Konstantinos’s wife, Marika, and advised on interior decoration during visits to the Mitsotakis house near Chania. John often needed friends in useful places and his charm and talent tended to deliver them. He stayed with the shipowner and art collector Stavros Niarchos on the magnate’s private island of Spetsopoula. When in Athens he remained a frequent visitor to the British Embassy after the Nortons left in 1951. Ample compensation for the loss of the ambassador’s wife arrived a few years later in the form of social secretary Lady Dorothy Lygon, whose dowdy exterior concealed a heart of gold. Everyone adored ‘Coote’ Lygon. Ardent, resourceful and loyal as a lioness, she is Lady Cordelia Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. Aware that John was broke, Coote arranged for him to draw

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Stavros Niarchos and John Craxton on Spetsopoula

the offspring of British diplomats in Athens. The memories of the sitters would differ, partly according to their willingness to sit. Some recalled a perfunctory encounter, others a delightful engagement with a child-like spirit. The latter group came to include Lizzie and Matthew Spender, children of Stephen and Natasha, as John enjoyed the patronage of kind friends in England. Some fine drawn and painted likenesses ensued from this fund-raising venture. In the spring of 1961 the Greek Foreign Minister, Evangelos Averoff-Tositsas offered Paddy Leigh Fermor use of his house at Metsovo in Epirus as a writer’s retreat. The author welcomed a party venue in ‘huge rooms surrounded by divans, with carved wooden ceilings, giving one the feeling of being inside a cigar box, jutting out in storey after storey, overlooking the snow-covered roofs of the highest village in Greece…’.7 His guests comprised John, Coote, Joan and Ricki Huston – estranged wife of film director John Huston and Paddy’s current flame. Immune to jealousy, Joan befriended her partner’s lovers. The house party went swimmingly – helped by the absent host’s cellar: he had planted the first Cabernet Sauvignon vines in Greece. Then they all set off on a grand adventure. In the Threspotian Mountains in western Epirus they stayed with the Charisis family of Sarakatsan pastoralists who had once wandered with their flocks across the Balkans, and whose nomadic way of life had halted in the past decade. Until then the clan had left low-lying winter grazing grounds after the festival of St George – taking everything they possessed for a two-month walk to high pastures and retracing their steps after the October festival of St Dimitrius. Temporary camps of conical wicker-and-reed huts had now given way to permanent shelters in two places, with trucks to ferry people and animals between them. Paddy had attended a traditional Sarakatsan wedding a decade earlier in what now seemed another age. It became the first chapter of his 1966 book Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece. Another striking Craxton jacket had a sun with rays like lightning strikes over a ravine running down to the sea. Just above the author’s name a small human figure, bright against black rock, descends with a reluctant pack animal as if passing protestingly into history.

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Jacket for Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece by Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1966

John also drew for the Roumeli volume a map of Greece northwards from Attica to the borders with Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Turkey. Twenty years after his arrival in Athens, he had now explored much of the Greek mainland and many islands, plus the monastic state and male dominion of the Mount Athos peninsula. Wandering these northern lands in the wake of the Civil War, he had been forced finally to recognise the enormity of internecine conflict. He stayed with a Macedonian couple who proudly showed him the household cesspit. Their children had been hidden there for three days and nights to avoid abduction as beaten Communists withdrew behind the Iron Curtain. That image stayed in his mind and confirmed his view against politics generally and extremism of left or right especially. He was always for the individual against the group and the state. His philosophy was close to pacifism: ‘I love soldiers and sailors and hate armies and navies.’ He was a hedonistic anarchist – and more comic than cynic. Once, answering the Kidderpore Avenue door to a Liberal Party canvasser, he said: ‘I usually vote for your party but you’re getting very active. Just promise me you won’t get in.’

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By 1960 John had sought out the finest Byzantine mosaics across the Greek world. When first in Athens he saw the magnificent depictions in the eleventh-century church at Daphni. He went to the monasteries of Hosios Loukas in Boeotia and Nea Moni on Chios, explored mosaic-rich churches in Salonika (St Demetrius, Holy Apostles, Rotunda) and paid repeated visits to Hagia Sophia and the Chora Church in Istanbul. To the Roman mosaics he had helped to uncover at St Albans as a child, Italian tours had now added explorations of Paestum, Pompeii, Herculaneum and, best of all, Byzantine Ravenna. John told gallery director Bryan Robertson, who visited him on Crete in 1960, that he found in Byzantine mosaics ‘qualities of incredible sensuality and depth of feeling’, with volume implied by reverse perspective – where the vanishing point is the viewer rather than an artificial horizon line – and a radiant use of limited colour derived from gold, stone and glass: As I’d been brought up to believe that oil pigment was the primary material for achieving illusion, in all senses of the word, as well as creating colour, this encounter with Byzantine art was a disruptive and strengthening experience. It gave me confidence to work in a way that I had wanted to anyway.1 Alongside a series of portraits of workmen – climbing ladders or carrying bags of materials as they restored the artist’s house – the first years in Chania produced long meditations on Hydra. The Craxton panoramas owed much to Nico Ghika’s Cubist landscapes but more to Byzantine mosaics. Bars and grids of parallel multicoloured lines resembled glass and stone strips and glittered like gold. Distanced from his subject, memory was distilled into a new level of art at once formal and lyrical. A ruined tower visible below the Ghika house remained a fixture, but now buildings merged with plants and rocks, and trees were pressed into fields of abstracted foliage. These flat, tessellated, linear landscapes conveyed a structural sense of perspective and an all-over unity finally resolved in the clear air of Crete: There’s very little mist in the atmosphere of Greece. It’s very clear; one can see very far and very close with the same amount of clarity. One doesn’t get a tonal perspective, one gets a structural perspective. The Byzantine painters were terribly clever at that. The good ones inverted perspective

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Landscape, Hydra, 1960–2 Tempera on canvas, 99 × 206 cm. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

– exactly what the Cubists thought they’d invented … One of my objects in life is to try and find a way of expressing something real by unreal means. As Picasso says, art is a lie – but a lie that helps you make a truth.2 John was working on the first Hydra panorama when, shortly before Christmas 1960, Christopher Mason had to leave for Paris when a tenant set fire to his flat. Relinquishing all responsibility to be led by John Craxton, he had just enjoyed the happiest six months of his life. Every day had been life-expanding – from a restaurant meal of a sheep’s head, with the two friends served an ear, an eye and half a brain apiece, to John summoning the director of the Archaeological Museum in Herakleion after finding a key exhibit wrongly labelled. A Minoan goddess was holding not snakes, he insisted, but agrimi goat horns. Even more remarkable for Christopher was the guilt-free sex: We both had regular friends – sailors who would leave their ship in the afternoon and return next morning having enjoyed first some snacks and wine in a taverna and then our bodies. Not once did any of them ask for or expect a single drachma. For the first time in my life I indulged in sex without feeling for a second that it was dirty or wrong or unmanly. To be with John was always a total joy. One was constantly astounded by his outrageous punning and amazed by an endless series of original insights covering every branch of civilised life. Above all, one admired his pursuit of perfection in everything he attempted and the considerable achievements that resulted.3 And yet the Craxton way was ultimately too much for Christopher Mason. In 1965 he fell in love with Joanna Carrington, artist niece of the Bloomsbury

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painter Dora Carrington. A Craxton New Year’s Eve party in Kidderpore Avenue was their first date. They restored a series of houses in France while Christopher made documentary films. John adored Joanna and her spoofing of the art world via a reclusive naïve artist named Reginald Pepper, whose acclaimed works were finally revealed to have been painted by Joanna herself. They were friends always. For John Craxton the evolution of the Hydra panoramas suffered a seismic break with the sudden shattering of what had inspired them. In September 1961 he was in London helping Nico with designs for Freddie Ashton’s ballet Persephone when the Ghikas received the unbelievable news that ‘your house on Hydra has entirely burned’. Nico and Barbara were too shocked to act. John was left to pick up the pieces – going back to salvage what he could on his friends’ behalf. He sent them long reports on all that had been rescued and lost, and how the disaster had unfolded. It had struck after a searing summer and unmotorised Hydra lacked a modern fire tender. John, clear-headed in a crisis, believed it was an accident due to the housekeeper abandoning a lit cigarette when drunk (‘he comes out of all this as an incredibly stupid person, really wicked people are never stupid – senseless yes’ 4 ). But John was aware of darker rumours. Nico wrote: ‘What I can’t understand is why he only raised the alarm when the house was half gone.’ The housekeeper was loyal to the first Mrs Ghika. While unlikely to have deliberately deprived himself of a livelihood, he was even whispered to have been in league with Nico’s enemies on an island where the artist was an architect of the miracle of conservation that Hydra is today. Likening the smouldering ruins to a phoenix nest, John found that Nico’s studio had survived while every other room was gutted. Neighbours had dragged pictures to safety, but the Egyptian screen was now a zig-zag of ash on the floor. John noted: Maybe in some strange way it was a sign from the gods to move on to other places. Above all there is something optimistic about the things that are left: blank canvases, a studio lamp, rolls of canvas, paints-inks-photos, beds, sheets, Barbara’s wonderful dresses, the pewter and only one of Ghika’s paintings burned. It doesn’t make me despair when I think of these things … I’m now more convinced than ever that Life is more important than Art & that the static picturesque beauty of Hydra is useless if it goes with such human life. I stopped off in Poros to reaffirm my belief in those wonderful qualities Greeks have, that excess of generosity.5 While John had everything that could be saved packed into the surviving gatehouse, the Ghikas sent detailed directions on where the rescued objects should be sent – Athens, Paris, London – or given away. Nico and Barbara never set eyes on the Hydra ruin; neither did Paddy and Joan. John, still seeing to the sorting, returned reluctantly in 1963:

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Ghika house in ruins

I pushed open the front gate and wandered down into Ghika’s old studio. Instead of easels and canvases there were now large bales of hay, fodder for Barba Yannis’s donkeys. One of these was probably the very animal that had been so indispensable to Ghika whenever he had needed to descend to the port or to make his way up to his home and studio.6 In 2008 John told the Anglo-Hydriot artist Katyuli Lloyd that he had been disgusted over how much had been plundered, confirming his worst feelings about Hydra at that time. He told her that he had concealed an unnamed treasure ‘in an alcove within an alcove’ in the staircase leading from the main terrace. When she searched the site, the hiding place was empty. Four decades on from the fire, the once impregnable Ghika house is one of Hydra’s few ruins. It remains the preserve of chickens, dogs and donkeys. The two open arches of the former studio continue to gaze out like blind eyes, below bent and twisted metal supports for what was once a terrace awning. The ghost house stands for the impermanence of things and the insignificance of places compared with irreplaceable human beings. As John wrote to the Ghikas: ‘The Greek landscape is wonderful but … it makes one realise that the only really important things are people – people can make houses but houses cannot make people.’ 7 A month after the fire, the magazine Eikones called Hydra’s artistic community a modern-day ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’.8 The dreams of so many ex-pat artists and writers were dashed by drink, drugs, depression and marital and parental catastrophes that were the other side of free love. Few had John Craxton’s double armour of toughness and talent to withstand the rigours of liberated life in the sun. The party around Charmian Clift and George Johnston had broken down into jealousy and acrimony before they returned to Australia, in 1964, with renewed optimism generated by George’s best book, My Brother Jack. Charmian killed herself in 1969, on the eve of publication of George’s Hydra-based Clean Straw for Nothing, which read like an act of revenge. George died a year later from tuberculosis and alcoholism.

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Leonard Cohen became a singer-songwriter on Hydra with the bittersweet ‘So Long Marianne’; he kept his house on the island until his death in 2016. He was as tough and talented as John Craxton, but those around him suffered more. His drug trip through the 1960s ended with the album Songs from a Room, with the back cover image of a smiling Marianne Ihlen, wrapped in a towel while seated at the troubadour’s typewriter. Aware that she alone within their circle did not paint or sculpt or write, Marianne finally concluded, as John almost did, ‘Life is my art’.9 Free spirits can cost others dear, and maybe it was fortunate that John never had children. The daughter and elder son of Charmian and George, golden in Hydra photos, died from suicide and alcoholism. Axel Jensen Junior, Marianne’s son, was confined to a psychiatric institution after a complicated history, including drug misuse. Leonard Cohen had a drug-involved breakdown. He spent late years in a Buddhist monastery until taking to the road and recording studio once again, and most triumphantly, after a manager stole his money. A life of gifts is unencumbered – free, most of all, from guilt. Back in England, Adrian Allinson – John’s artist neighbour in Clifton Hill – died in February 1959, leaving Molly Mitchell-Smith with an uncertain future in the live-work space they had shared. When John heard that the Higgins Trust (Bedford’s Cecil Higgins Museum donor) wanted to sell the studios he let Molly know, to help her out. She bought his studio and served him with an order to quit. He refused, citing a protected tenancy and gathering artist friends in support. According to John, Molly then played her trump card. She had logged the men John brought back at night, in a surveillance operation achieved by climbing out of a window, walking over the roof and peering down through a skylight. Several years before homosexuality became legal in England in private, she used this information to force an eviction. John recalled: It was terrible. I told my lawyer, ‘The problem is, it’s all true.’ He said: ‘Don’t tell me anything. As far as I’m concerned you are innocent.’ But I was so appalled that all this information might come out, and upset my mother and father, that we pleaded No Contest. I moved out in July 1962 – storing my stuff with my parents. It was this that finally decided me to leave England for Crete. John concluded that a country allowing such injustice was not for him. As he turned 40 in the autumn of 1962, he made plans to settle permanently on Crete by buying the Moschon house. Technically, this was illegal. No foreigner was allowed to own a Greek property with direct harbour access for fear they might prove the advance party for another invasion force. John could have evaded that veto since the Moschon entrance was in a backstreet, but the whole of Crete had been declared a frontier zone so, on paper at least, foreigners could neither buy nor build there. In practice, the more determined and trusting philhellenes used Greek proxies to sign contracts. This practice was risky, as

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the person named on the deeds could claim the property. John rightly trusted his lawyer to do the decent thing. To anyone except John Craxton, a lack of money to buy Moschon – as well as a right to legal title – would have reduced a plan to a pipe-dream. But once he had negotiated a purchase price equal to £600, the Graham Sutherland picture gifted by Peter Watson was sold for a similar sum. Then Magouche was told that, if she footed a £200 repairs bill, they could share the house together. Touched by such generosity, she wrote out a cheque. Magouche had not seen the Chania house but her daughter, Maro, stayed there on a Cretan holiday. John was welcoming but Maro was surprised by a proprietorial air assumed by other visitors. One who seemed very much at home was Matthew Spender – and that was fine because he and Maro fell lastingly in love. Still, there was something odd about the atmosphere – a mystery solved much later. Three ladies were lunching in London one day when, as it often did, the conversation turned to Greece. Magouche Fielding (now married to Xan) said that she had owned a house on Crete for years. ‘What a coincidence’, said Joan Leigh Femor. ‘So have I.’ Barbara Ghika looked at her friends and said: ‘Well, so have I!’ There was laughter as they gathered that each had contributed £200 for a phantom share in the Craxton house. After John’s death Magouche was asked whether they had felt defrauded. ‘We gave the money gladly’, she said. ‘Johnny had done so much to help us with our houses and of course we wanted to help him. What did he live on, after all? Crumbs.’ Perhaps that was the end of the story. Natasha Spender denied giving John another £200, but this may have been one more affair that Stephen hid from his wife. What is certain is that John Craxton planned to buy Moschon while broke and ended up with the house, repair funds and enough to live on until his next exhibition. Greece was cheap in those days, but you had to be inordinately charming or lucky, or a consummate trickster, to live the kind of life in the sun enjoyed by John Craxton. Talent was nothing like enough. When Christopher left, John made his studio on the top floor and returned the salon to the one formal room in the house. From the French windows to the balcony he could see down to the harbour’s edge, where men and boys fished with poles, made and mended nets, and hung catches of octopus in the sun. Half-way along the mole, a boatyard produced wooden caiques until dusk each day. Then a parade of night fishers set out in small boats – moving with a perilous sway since prows were weighted by large lanterns. They rowed into mid-harbour then hitched in lines behind the caique towing them to the fishing grounds. As each chain passed the lighthouse, like a floating string of festive illuminations, the fishermen blew long, wavering blasts on conch shells. It was the sound of unruly romance and it is a wonder John Craxton ever worked at all amid such company. But Joan, visiting Chania over Easter 1963, had a lonely time of it. Missing Paddy badly, she wrote: ‘I’m afraid the sailor life is too much for me. Johnny is literally entwined with them at every meal, the only times I see him as he is occupied otherwise.’10

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Kardamyli under construction, by Joan Leigh Fermor

Kardamyli interior

While John was angling to buy Moschon, Paddy and Joan – barred from Crete by that blood feud – had thoughts of a house of their own on the Mani peninsula of the Peloponnese. Having considered converting one of the domestic fortresses depicted on the Mani book cover, they determined to build in an olive grove above a small cove and below the Taygetus Mountains near the village of Kardamyli. Pitching their tents on the site of their future sitting room, they plotted what was to become part villa, part monastic cloister and one of the most beautiful houses in Greece. John contributed to the plans and expected to be a regular visitor. Kardamyli was a six-hour taxi ride from Athens, where John now lodged at 3 Kriezotou Street – in the apartment block that Nico was carving into his home and studio in the capital. The building off Syntagma Square rose from social to domestic and finally to work spaces in a highly personalised form of refined modernism. Reclaimed bricks and industrial cement blocks remained exposed within an interior design achieving a rare elegance and harmony. John, sleeping in an annexe off the top-floor studio, aided the transformation; he and Nico added the painted marbling effects they both loved. One morning in 1963 John was painting in Chania when Michael Cacoyannis tracked him down. They had already met up in Athens and Hydra while the ex-actor was developing a career as a film director. John had so admired his 1954 comedy Windfall in Athens that he used contacts to get it shown in London and Edinburgh. Now Cacoyannis wanted help for his biggest project yet. His audacious plan was to write, edit, direct and produce a screen adaptation of the 1946 Nikos Kazantzakis novel Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas – soon to be known as Zorba the Greek. Signing up stars Alan Bates, Anthony Quinn, Irene Papas and Simone Signoret, he was now in Crete to scout for locations. More than renaming the novel, the movie would remodel Greece.

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John Craxton by Anthony Quinn

Nine times nominated for a Nobel Prize, the iconoclastic Kazantzakis had been born in Herakleion and at his death, in 1957, was the most controversial writer in the Greek world. His life-grabbing, comic-dramatic character Zorba (Anthony Quinn) latches on to a prim, nameless Anglo-Greek (Alan Bates) as he travels to Crete to reopen a mine and unlock his possible gift as a writer. His affair with the Widow (Irene Papas) and Zorba’s with Madame Hortense would have fatal consequences. From a soundtrack that made composer Mikis Theodorakis famous to the final dancing of the two leading men on the beach, Zorba the movie wrapped a dark story in what became an unlikely promotional package for Greece – thanks in no small part to the austerely beautiful camerawork of Walter Lassally. John led Michael Cacoyannis to some of the prettiest villages in western Crete. But the film maker rejected pretty villages; the place he had in mind had to look wretchedly poor. When finally accepting Kokkino Chorio – a rather lovely settlement overlooking Souda Bay – he had earth and rubbish strewn on the street to make a dirt track. John should have smelt a rat at that early point. Bemused villagers stifled protests since most of them were being hired as extras. John said: In truth I can’t bear the writer Kazantzakis. He’s taken over by Nietzsche and the German idea of a superman: Zorba is a flawed superman. In the book and film the Cretan peasants are the dark forces of nature, all terribly Wagnerian. They wouldn’t stone a woman in Crete and when someone has died they would never strip the house. No one would go near a house someone has died in. Everything has to be clean and new. The old things are thrown out – gypsies take them away. Kazantzakis missed the whole Cretan point about renewal. He can’t have known Crete very well although he was born there. He was very hard on the monks, casting them as devilish and they’re not like that at all. While alert to its flaws and contradictions, John loved the Orthodox church far beyond his interest in the buildings. When, back in 1948, he learned of the death of Kit Nicholson in a flying accident, he went at once to the monastery on Poros to light a candle. In a condolence letter to E.Q., he wrote that ‘there’s

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a great human grandeur about the Greek church & a spirit of optimism that I find heaven sent’.11 The faults of the Zorba book were to be writ large on the big screen, and to cause deep offence on Crete. Meanwhile, there was fun in the making: Eventually the film would send me to sleep, but I was thrown into the middle of filming. One day the doorbell rang and it was Anthony Quinn. He said, ‘Hi. I’m Anthony Quinn the actor.’ I said, ‘Oh, good morning. I’m John Craxton the painter. Do come in.’ Looking around the kitchen, he saw a naïve picture I’d found and said, ‘I like that. Can I buy it?’ I said it wasn’t for sale. He just wanted to hoover up everything he could find. He said, ‘All my life I’ve wanted to paint – not quite what you’re doing but colour all over the canvas.’ He showed me one and I said, ‘It looks like occupational therapy to me.’ He said, ‘OK, how do I take up sculpture?’ I said, ‘first of all you need sculpting tools.’ ‘Where do I get them?’ ‘The best are in Rome.’ So he sent his private jet. John witnessed a final clash between Simone Signoret – playing Madame Hortense, former prostitute and keeper of the deceptively named Ritz Hotel – and the director: She was supposed to look like an old woman and, already ageing, she couldn’t do it. There was a ghastly moment when she was sacked and left for the airport in tears. Then I was in my studio painting away when I heard a taxi pull up below. A sweet little lady got out and tried to ask directions in French. This was Lila Kedrova, a Russian actress based in Paris. I put her on the back of my motorbike and took her to the set. The Zorba crew took over Chania for four months from March 1964 – with John amused to note that Irene Papas, a twice-married thirtysomething Communist, was still being chaperoned by her mother in the prevailing Greek manner for young girls. Michael Cacoyannis asked him where they could eat together and he recommended The Crabs, even though he had to cook his own fish in the kitchen. ‘All they had was a bit of roast chicken or lamb and lentil soup. It was out of bounds to US naval personnel. So the fact that I ate there put me under suspicion.’ However, it was the only possible rider in what John termed ‘a one-horse town at best’. Swift grooming was required: I rushed round and said, ‘If you want to make money get organised fast because I have told the Zorba film crew to eat here tonight.’ When I went back at about 8 o’clock I couldn’t believe my eyes. Old trestle tables were covered in bedsheets so that it looked like a buffet in a rather grand restaurant. On this table were lobsters and fishes and the Zorba people said, ‘No wonder you live here, the food is wonderful!’ They never looked

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back. Zorba sent in 15 or 20 people every day, and then there were all the gawpers too. Everyone wanted to brush against the glamour of the movie world. On one occasion Quinn, Signoret, Bates and Papas were at one end of the extended dining table while Orestis, a ten-year-old peanut vendor, sat proudly at the other end, pretending to read a Greek newspaper upside down. John loved the drama but: It was also the stupidest thing I ever did because Zorba wrecked the atmosphere of the harbour and there was the same effect on the whole of Greece – the sirtaki bowdlerised as Zorba’s Dance, everywhere a Café Zorba and a Hotel Zorba, and it all became a theme park. Since then I’ve had in the back of my mind an article about all the places (Cornwall, the South of France) that artists have ruined. Zorba the Greek was a global box-office hit – especially in America, where the film won three of the seven Academy Awards for which it was nominated (the winners including Walter Lassally and Lila Kedrova). By this point Alan Bates had given up the idea of buying a house in Chania’s old town. Walter Lassally, whose brilliant career as a cinematographer already included A Girl in Black, A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, stayed on. He settled in the village of Stavros – where the two male stars had danced on the beach – and whose cliff-like mountain, freed from the gimcrack pulley system that collapses near the end of the film, is visible from John’s balcony and terrace. For years the Lassally Oscar was a doorstop in the bath bathroom of his agent, Kate Campbell, first in London and then in Suffolk; John visited both convivial houses, rolling up and roaring off on his motorbike. Walter lived with the widowed Kate for a time, until returning to Crete with his Oscar, where he died in 2017 aged 90. His Zorba statuette predeceased him. Lent to the beachside Christiana’s Restaurant, it melted in a 2012 New Ye Year’s Day fire.

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PORTENT OF TRAGEDY

For thoughtful and creative seekers after more than just the sun, Chania in the early 1960s was very close to heaven. Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, whose books had done much to woo the Craxton generation to Greece, had already moved on, driven by the certainty that a pre-war idyll could not last. But after a decade of conflict and further years of trauma, Greece was a magnet for artistic and romantic explorers – the last adventurers before mass tourism. If Hydra had been the toast of creative philhellenes from the mid-1950s, a glass brimful of inspiration and enjoyment had now passed to Chania. One of John Craxton’s greatest gifts was for being in the right place at the right time. To be on the Chania harbourside just then felt extraordinary. Friends who came out to visit basked in his good fortune and claimed some for themselves. Ailing Julian Trevelyan made a recuperative trip with his wife Mary Fedden. The three artists roamed and drew together as the sun, the life and the landscape worked their magic. While travelling widely, Julian and Mary were always glad to return to domestic bliss beside the Thames at Durham Wharf. Other visitors to Crete were loath to leave. In the summer of 1963, Tim Salmon, fresh from Oxford, arrived with suitcase, guitar and typewriter. Overhearing a Cretan conversation in a wine shop, he found a friend for life when one of them uttered the words Charlie Mingus. This was John Craxton. Tim came to share the Craxton fascination for ‘all things Cretan: history, music, customs, architecture, artefacts, landscape’. He himself would later marry a Greek, write about Greece and film the last shepherd nomads in the north. In John, Tim admired a storyteller of charming social graces, at ease in the most elevated circles. But crucially: The Greece that he loved was the vernacular Greece of sheepfold and harbourside, the Greece of the people who, dirt poor in those days, had only their traditions of heroic values to live by: physical courage, loyalty, family honour, the sacred duty of hospitality to guests … There was always a certain lordly swagger to him, with his Highland regimental trews and old BSA 125 motorbike. He would pack me off to the mountains with packets of Matsangou cigars as gifts for his shepherd friends, which, with a sly wink, they took as evidence of his aristocratic status – o lordhos Craxton.1 And he had bothered to learn Greek; not many foreigners do. It is such a different culture, with such different values, that only a knowledge of the

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language really gives you an insight into … in a sense, he was one of them, at least when he wanted to be.2 Like the Cretan shepherds, John was such a prankster that, when he arrived in Tim Salmon’s Chania kitchen on the evening of 22 November 1963 and announced that President Kennedy had been shot, everyone laughed at yet another joke of questionable taste. After lunch with a glamorous lady journalist, she got out her cigarettes and he proffered a matchbox – containing a live scorpion. His humour, even then, was in danger of biting him. Part of Henry Miller’s circle in 1930s Paris now reassembled in Chania. Betty Ryan was the young American painter who had seduced Miller with ‘faithful ravishing descriptions of Greece’ and won thanks on The Colossus of Maroussi’s opening page. Her ‘sweet ecstatic voice’ could be as eloquent of desertion as discovery, and of her need for personal distance. One marriage lasted a few weeks; she was 13 years into another when, as she later recalled, ‘I picked up my handbag and left’.3 The illegitimate daughter of a rich New Yorker, Betty had travelled with her mother in Europe, picking up languages as she went but learning to prefer silence and self-sufficiency. At 16 she was studying art with Hans Hofmann in New York and at 18 with Amédée Ozenfant in Paris. In Olympia, during a student trip to Greece, she had a revelation: ‘The magic light has never left me since it seemed to come out of the earth…’4 Her money went in acts of generosity to other artists and an apparent need to divest herself of material baggage in order to work on her original and fantastical art. Betty Ryan was on Crete because of the Austrian-born writer Alfred Perles – Carl in Henry Miller’s novels Tropic of Cancer and Quiet Days in Clichy. Larry Durrell had helped him to become a naturalised Briton. Now in Chania with his Scottish wife, Anne, he wrote all morning, then poured his bawdy good humour into café life – reading aloud letters from Miller in which ‘disappointingly, the grand old man spoke chiefly of his incontinence’.5 Fred and Anne followed Betty into a Kastelli courtyard at the top of Lithinon Street, as neighbours of another ex-pat American artist, Dorothy Andrews. This abstract impressionist had mixed in avant-garde circles in New York before a life-changing Greek holiday. Tall, with a gangling stride, she grew close to John and was one of the few people allowed into his studio to comment on his work. Her captivating flat above the harbour, filled with antique Cretan furnishings and weavings, occupied the top floor of the building once holding the archives of the Venetian empire. Standing at their windows each evening, Dorothy and John had a signalling system to fix whose turn it was to host drinks. As well as meeting at The Crabs, the internationalist set gravitated between the Andrews flat, the Craxton house and 1 Angel Street – the most imposing Venetian and Ottoman house in the harbour area, with the best views and a walled garden, then being rescued from near-dereliction by a young American novelist, Charles Haldeman. He brought to Chania the gay American poets

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Ravine, 1960 Tempera on canvas, 44 × 44.5 cm. Private collection

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James Merrill and Charles Henri Ford, both becoming friends of John Craxton – John having already enjoyed a closer, if briefer, relationship with Charles Henri’s brother-in-law, Zachary Scott, in the yacht off Poros. Then, after sailing around Greece with Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti one summer, the musical partners and lovers Stanley Joseph Seeger and Francis James ‘Jimmy’ Brown came on to Chania by themselves to see Charles Haldeman and party with sailors. Both became intimates of John Craxton. Stanley Seeger looked like a cross between Robinson Crusoe and Jesus. The mid-westerner had the aura of incredible wealth, thanks to a family fortune in oil and timber – hugging his privacy and whispering when he troubled to speak at all. He had studied architecture, then switched to music and dabbled as an avant-garde playwright and poet. While studying with the composer Luigi Dallapicolla in Florence, Stanley met fellow American Jimmy Brown. They were together for 15 years, until their personal partnership came apart amid the promiscuity of Chania. Their musical links, on works credited to Joseph James after their middle names, continued. People were to have sharply divided memories of Charles Haldeman. Most recalled an engaging and generous man; others caught an underhand note. All the long-staying foreigners were taken for spies, but the profile of a CIA agent attached itself most doggedly to Charles. He loved Crete sincerely – noting the ongoing veracity of the battle cry ‘Freedom or Death!’ that had carried its population through six nineteenth-century uprisings against the Turks: The Cretan resembles his island in more ways than he will ever suspect … His profound longing for freedom is rooted in an equally profound rejection of boundaries, whether those of the sea or his own body. His life, therefore, is a struggle against every restriction and limitation, no matter how minor. And in this urge to reach an impossible dimension of the soul, death is the only coastline he respects – not because he must, but because it is the only worthy alternative to the absolute freedom he desires.6 The misfortune of Charles Haldeman’s life was meeting Nikos Stavroulakis – a charismatic teller of stories that grew taller in the telling. He was a truly gifted linguist, historian, theologian, philosopher, teacher, painter, printmaker, writer, collector, aesthete and cook. His most useful asset, as it turned out, was a Greek passport. When Charles had found the house on Angel Street, he arranged with publisher Tom Maschler that they should buy it together. This being Crete, they needed a Greek partner to sign the contract – which Nikos Stavroulakis duly did. As the house had been divided into three, they could share it happily. The happiness proved another myth. Tom Maschler was quietly bought out by Nikos, who then engineered Charles Haldeman’s eviction. Charles published his third and last novel in 1971, the year he wrote the screenplay for Charles Henri Ford’s scandalous Cretan-shot homosexual film Johnny Minotaur (mothers of the teenage cast tried to stone the director

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as the devil). Then his last decade – he died suddenly, in Athens, aged 51 – was lost in fruitless litigation over Angel Street that his family continued after his death. Possession of a Greek passport proved to be 100 per cent of the law, and Nikos Stavroulakis kept the house. A second gay American writer was living in Chania when John arrived. Allen Bole had been a harpsichordist’s assistant and was now trying, albeit feebly, to become a novelist. He brought in a blue-eyed, chameleon-minded Adonis named Bruce Chatwin, who found him ‘rather hopeless but highly entertaining’. Bruce used to say: ‘He doesn’t realise that the Mediterranean is very tough. People come here and think dolce far niente – it’s nice to do nothing – and it ruins them.’7 It was unfair to say that Allen Bole was doing nothing. He was ever busier in the bars, drinking and looking for pick-ups. Like so many, John was enthralled by Bruce Chatwin, who was soon staying at Moschon. Starting as a Sotheby’s porter and ending as head of the Antiquities and Impressionism departments, he always travelled widely. He studied archaeology at the University of Edinburgh – where John’s old friend Stuart Piggott became besotted by him – and then took off again without taking a degree. Bruce was a roaming storyteller: his future books were to be mostly about nomads, the most itinerant and shape-shifting character of all being the author himself. Meanwhile, he made expeditions into the White Mountains in pursuit of rare plants for a botanical essay and shepherds for pleasure. An appalling fate awaited Allen Bole. Alcoholic and increasingly reckless, he shared with Charles Haldeman the sexual services of one poor and unstable local youth. Allen was murdered in his house one night, his throat cut with such vindictive force that he was virtually decapitated. Betty Ryan wrote: On Crete, side by side with the splendors, there hovers portent of tragedy. A persistent ingredient of doom is in the air and in the brilliant but heavy mercurial light. Fred caught this when he was writing a novel about Chania in Allen’s house, on Allen’s desk, where in an uncanny and outrageous way he describes the hideous murder of Allen Bole which in reality took place several years later. The whole ambiance of Chania seemed to invite extremes. I remember watching out of my window with Fred during a raging storm down on the basin of the old port and we saw the broiling water lick up over the quay, dislodge a parked car, lift it and drop it into the sea.8 On Crete, winter tempests wash away roads and bridges; spring gusts from the Libyan desert scourge the land with gritty dust; heat annihilates in summers prone to violent tremors. The Great Island has had six catastrophic earthquakes in the past 650 years. John Craxton had a gift for self-preservation, and an ability to work peacefully amid tumult; but the idyll of Chania was becoming shadowed even for him. Rumours of spying and looting mounted amid growing political tensions. It was a relief when work projects confined him to London.

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ECLIPSE OF APOLLO

The stars seemed aligned for John Craxton as he embarked on a constellation of bright projects for 1966. His latest solo exhibition sold reasonably well and the catalogue was packed with promise – unveiling a new fascination with the ravine as the defining feature of the Cretan landscape, and announcing a 25-year career survey at the Whitechapel Art Gallery that autumn. Bearing the latest Craxton jacket, Paddy’s Roumeli won warm reviews and prominent bookshop displays. It could be seen near a second Craxton design of three ethereal figures in white for Iris Murdoch’s novel, the philosophical fantasy The Time of the Angels. John also assisted a production of Daphnis and Chloë at the summer Athens Festival – part of the sets had been mislaid in transit so he painted a new fig tree and took the rolled-up canvas out to Greece. In Greece he had been interviewed by an army general. Allegations circulating and spiralling against him on Crete, added to those from Poros, had been passed to Athens. As he wrote to Joan and Paddy, the resulting report was at least partly reassuring: I was dead scared but he put one at ones ease – ‘take a cigarette’ etc. but he looked at me with very searching eyes through his thick glasses – so Im pleased to see he found me fairly alright as a person. Im convinced that the only way to clear things once & for all is to do it all in writing with a statement on oath so to speak that I have never been involved in subversive activities nor do I intend to & that any evidence – if there is any – is false and would not stand up to legal inquiry. I can see in retrospect that my way of living & the friends I have known in Greece might give the police cause for thinking this way.’1 John now surmised how a request from Souda’s naval base commander to design a shield for the vessel HS Laskos had fuelled his problems. He had applied for police permission ‘to enter the barracks in order to work on the shield & supervise casting etc’ – the ‘etc’ being the perfect excuse to meet sailors – but had then been ‘too busy’ to follow it up. Now he could see that such dereliction (he had probably just forgotten) might be taken for sinister intent. Worst of all was his recollection of Junkie Fleischmann sailing on his ship-of-state-style yacht into Chania harbour – bringing more American VIPs. Watched by police informers, Charles Haldeman and John had joined them for lavish hospitality. Charles was of course widely perceived to be a CIA agent

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– and one of the luminaries on board was none other than the Central Intelligence Agency chief, Allen Dulles. A ridiculous coincidence looked like resounding proof of Craxton guilt. Suddenly art looked safer than life in a real Greek drama. Several theatre projects had been mooted during the 1950s. John made designs for William Walton’s 1954 opera Troilus and Cressida based on a Trojan War fable: they were not adopted. When Graham Sutherland dropped out of Michael Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage at Covent Garden in 1955, John would have stepped in like a shot; but after numerous artists were approached, Barbara Hepworth accepted. He worked on ideas for Kenneth MacMillan’s 1960 revival of the Stravinsky and Balanchine ballet The Fairy’s Kiss: they were not approved. His sole success was with Sam Wanamaker, a left-wing actor, director and exile from Chicago. They presented The World of Sholem Aleichem – Jewish humour in episodes and tableaux – at Hampstead’s Embassy Theatre. Sam wanted drawings in the style of the American social-realist artist Ben Shahn on a drop curtain: So I took six drawings, put them on colour blocks and made a mosaic stretching across an old cloth for the curtain. I was using the latest white colour called plastic paint – acrylic – and found that it dried very quickly and you could paint on top of it. We got a tin of pure acrylic medium from the factory, and I mixed the dyes with this and brushed them on the white so there was a luminous enamel look. Intrigued by this unknown medium, I began to use it in all my paintings. Finally John was re-hired by Frederick Ashton to design a revival of Apollo (originally Apollon musagète). It had been choreographed by a 24-year-old George Balanchine to music by Stravinsky for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1928, with a brilliant mix of classical ballet and jazz movement. The plot moved from the birth of Apollo, through his encounters with creative muses, to his ascent as a god to Mount Parnassus. John was in his element, borrowing Nico’s Little Venice studio and saying: ‘I want to capture the essence of Greece, rather than the travel poster side’.2 Preparations for the production – due to premiere at Covent Garden on 15 November – began well: Freddie gave me a completely free hand. I wanted it to be incredibly abstracted, with the elements of Ancient Greece and a naked Apollo as

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the God of Light. The whole point of the ballet is luminosity. I wanted the scenery lit in such a way, with green and pink light, to give marvellous textures and an effect like mother of pearl. For the last scene of apotheosis, when he is taken up to heaven in a chariot, I had an abstracted rock. The scene was to become more and more golden and the backcloth was to be a huge sun disc which was to go up in a blaze of golden light. On 16 September Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra, directed and designed by librettist Franco Zeffirelli, launched the new Metropolitan Opera House in New York and flopped spectacularly. Fleeing to Europe, Barber declared: ‘I’m not going to write any more music – I’m through.’3 John Craxton read the reviews and saw a warning of rocks ahead. On an earlier Barber visit to London, John had spent a chaste night in his Regent Palace Hotel suite overlooking Piccadilly Circus. They arrived in dinner jackets after an embassy reception, and Sam forgot his when he flew to Italy next morning. Essie and Harold were amused when John reached Kidderpore Avenue bleary-eyed around noon with his friend’s dinner jacket over his arm. They had talked long into the night – John never forgetting the Barber observation: ‘Amateurs can feel just as passionately about art as professionals, but they lack one essential quality: humility.’ Essie packed a clothes parcel and found a conductor bound for Italy. The problem for John now was that George Balanchine had conceived Apollo with minimalist décor, and still exerted steely authority. His New York disciple John Taras was sent to London to supervise the staging, with a clash on arrival: ‘Taras said, “This Is Not What I Want.” We practically came to blows. Freddie rushed in by taxi and tried to sort things out. Then there was treachery on all sides.’ John wanted his coloured lines on canvas side panels to be textured, and the head of the design studio proposed wood glue. During the lighting rehearsal the glue melted and the panels buckled. They were replaced with black emulsion, as was Craxton’s painting on Apollo’s stairway. Injury added to insult when the designer’s motorbike was damaged in the studio by a plummeting trapdoor. I co-opted the critic Richard Buckle from the start because he was a great expert on the Diaghilev period. He was with me all the time; but he savaged the décor in his review because Taras was staying with him. Then they dismantled it all and returned to black drapes. I had the dresses cut straight rather than at an angle but soon they were back on the slant. They put Apollo in a loincloth but he was white because it was winter and they tried brown body paint, and the colour came off on one of the female dancers. I wasn’t strong enough to demand. I should have got Stravinsky to back me. Bryan Robertson, with twin passions for visual art and dance, had loved John’s designs for Daphnis and Chloë. Now he cheered Apollo too: ‘These sets and

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Design for Daphnis and Chloë drop curtain, 1964 Watercolour and gouache on paper, 33 × 49.5 cm. Private collection

costumes reached a peak rare in English stage design and are certainly among the finest things produced for Covent Garden since 1945.’4 Such ringing acclaim found no echoes elsewhere. What should have been a double Craxton triumph in ballet design became one long saga of disappointment. John spent years tinkering with Daphnis and Chloë sets, and in 1964 had devised a muchimproved drop curtain where a racy Pan stood with arms outstretched and genitals exposed amid a scene of goats, rocks and figs in yellow, red, white and black. They were repainted in the mid-1970s. But after Anthony Dowell – a former Daphnis dancer – became artistic director of the Royal Ballet Company from 1986, John’s work was dropped entirely: When my designs were binned for new ones by Martyn Bainbridge, I went in fear and trepidation. But he did the whole thing in beige with Greek letters in polystyrene blocks and with Pan coming out of a full moon. I was terrified that it would be so much better than mine but what joy in my heart when it wasn’t! By November 1966 the billed Craxton retrospective should have been well under way. Bryan Robertson was an art presenter of genius – his 17 years at Whitechapel Art Gallery from 1952 produced a programme of astounding depth and breadth, from the giants of American Abstract Expressionism to a George

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Stubbs survey and the first solo show for J.M.W. Turner since his death in 1851. He recognised emerging British artists (Anthony Caro, David Hockney, Bridget Riley) and revived interest in older talents (Robert Colquhoun, Barbara Hepworth, John Craxton). He wanted to cheer up the East End with uplifting art and steered clear of the downbeat and depressing, saying: ‘What I look for in art in any period is imaginative energy, radiance, equilibrium, composure, colour, light, vitality, poise, buoyancy, a transcendent ability to soar above life and not be subjugated by it.’5 He added that this was part of a ‘concern with pleasure, beautiful places, good-looking people and frivolous living’. Such a summary was, of course, John Craxton to a tee. While sharing the same delights, John and Bryan were highly sociable singletons who suffered the same boredom in matters of business and bureaucracy. In 1966 the Whitechapel Art Gallery was in financial crisis. The Craxton retrospective was delayed and it was touch and go whether the show would happen at all – and, indeed, whether the venue itself would survive. In the end it was delivered through administrative sleight of hand: a general grant from the Drapers’ Company was diverted to this specific purpose – an appropriation of funds for which the donors were not consulted and might not have approved. The exhibition John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings 1941–1966 featured more than 150 pictures and one sculpted male head. Despite the delay, John was still working on the last exhibit until 6am on the launch day. Jennie Lee, first Minister for the Arts, opened the show. The cast of lenders and/or private view attenders included many of the key names in John’s life: Harold and Essie, Janet, Joan and Paddy, Nico and Barbara, Magouche, Margot, Freddie, Lady Norton, Sonia Quennell, Kenneth Clark, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, E.Q. Nicholson, Stephen Spender, Cyril Connolly. Peter Watson was represented with the uncatalogued portrait of the mournful boy painted in his memory. Ernst Freud lent a drawing (Self-Portrait, 1945) and Lucian was still on good enough terms with his youthful friend to see the show. Charting a journey from darkness into light, monochrome into sunburst colour, and reflection into revelry, the Whitechapel exhibition opened in a cold English January in 1967. It was out of kilter with the creative climate of the moment, and drew at best a tepid response from critics in thrall to American Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and the cool satiric gloss of Pop art. John Russell wrote in The Times: ‘These elaborate compositions, heaped thin and high, push hard against the handicap of happiness.’ John could only laugh. There was even a joke in the idea that he might be struggling with the burden of happiness when he was embracing it gleefully and utterly. His joyful paintings often hit a raw nerve with puritans – and some hinted, in the year when homosexuality was decriminalised only if remaining hidden, that this artist was way too gay. Thanking Joan for champagne, John concluded:

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I think the show was a success though I must confess I wasn’t quite connected with all the early stuff I suppose the umbilical cord has been cut & I really can only look at my recent things & even they are fast fading on me. really all ones sins laid out for miles can give one a horrible turn. still I suppose even ones sins can give pleasure – otherwise I dont see much point in them.6 John had spent most of the previous year in England, working on projects of enormous potential that had produced discouragement or disaster. He salvaged what he could from the Whitechapel opportunity – seizing on Bryan Robertson’s personal satisfaction with the outcome to secure a similar arrangement for Nico (that 1968 presentation would be among Bryan’s final East End flings). John had also engineered what became a series of successful Ghika shows at the Leicester Galleries. But an era was ending. On 27 January St Martin-in-the-Fields church hosted a memorial service for Oliver Brown, guiding spirit of the Leicester Galleries and stalwart Craxton supporter. This sad event was another pointer to departure. Feeling that he was done with the disagreeable and dispiriting land of his birth, he looked homeward to Greece, aiming to live the life and paint the pictures he wanted. The omens were not good. In December SS Herakleion – a ferry plying between Piraeus and Souda Bay that John often used – sank in a storm, taking with it at least 217 lives plus the Typaldos Lines, whose remaining vessels were found to be unseaworthy. John had a gnawing suspicion that his career was shipwrecked, but his Greek refuge itself was now in peril. All those ravine paintings were a prelude to rupture.

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INTO THE RAVINE

Easter is the most magical festival in the Orthodox calendar, and best of all for John Craxton as set in the glory of a Cretan spring – when the citrus and olive groves are in blossom and all but the snow-covered mountain crests is awash with wild flowers. At this time of renewal, chanting from the churches meets the carolling of birdsong. In Chania on Good Friday, as elsewhere in Greece, a bier bearing a flowerfilled model of Christ’s tomb is escorted through the streets to the cathedral by the Greek army and a brass band. After the Saturday late evening Resurrection mass, white candles burning with holy lights are borne home – with John joining in the tradition of marking a new cross in candle-smoke on front-door lintels for good luck. While he was never a believer in abstinence, Easter feasts of roasted goats, turned on spits for many hours by famished boys, following 40 days of meat-free fasting, were a passion. But Easter festivities in 1967 turned into a wake. On 21 April, a week before Good Friday and with a fraught election pending, a clique of colonels staged a coup. Greek politics had lurched from crisis to crisis but life had carried on, so John paid scant attention. Now he turned a sardonic eye on the military crusaders for morality and Christianity – swift to ban long hair on boys and miniskirts on girls. As political activists were being detained, the apolitical painter still thought scornful wit the best weapon. For him the new state of public affairs was absurd. He knew the brother of Interior Minister Stylianos Pattakos – commander of the tank division that seized Athens – as a vegetable seller in Chania market. A man of John Craxton’s sensitivity should have noticed that the first casualty of authoritarianism is a sense of humour: the sillier the regime, the more sensitive the rulers to mockery. The ex-pat artist was in a delicate position given his interest in sailors and soldiers, and perennial whispers of espionage; but he was unable to tread carefully or shut up. Magouche said: ‘Johnny had to leave Greece when his jokes ran away with him.’1 The policeman tapped on the head with the clay owl during his first months in Chania was now in a position of empowerment. And so a perceived threat to Ancient Greek heritage, if not to the moral fibre of modern manhood, was given the order of the boot. Magouche and Coote helped him pack and drove him away. The house on the harbour was to be tenanted by film maker Christopher Miles and other friends until its owner could return in better-humoured times. Although putting a brave face on his self-inflicted fate, John felt expelled

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from Eden – with no idea when, if ever, he might get back. He did nothing to hasten the removal of the colonels, even counselling Maurice Bowra not to sign a petition calling for protests and boycotts since intellectuals, like artists, should speak for themselves. ‘I’ve always been the aesthete and never the polemicist’, he said late in life. ‘I hate being manipulated by anybody. I make my own decisions and my own mistakes.’ John reckoned that the Marxist critic John Berger had warmed to his pictures when he (jokingly) told him his shoeless subjects were a political protest. In fact, he felt that ‘those roaming lads were left free and quite happy to develop a natural leather on the soles of their feet’. This is what he had done during many barefoot months of childhood. Now the hedonistic painter could at least claim a certain moral high-ground in his enforced exit, since so many professed leftists and liberals continued to seek out the sun in junta-led Greece. He said: ‘Someone with a certain amount of clout said he could get me back into the country, but I didn’t want any favours from people like that. I was against that sort of tyranny.’ All the same, as he suffered agonies of absence he did try to make his case and effect his return. He told Joan in a letter sent to Kardamyli that he had written a ‘full explanation’ of the allegations against him: although I’m just a small bit flattered at being thought intelligent enough I have a mounting anger at the incredible provincial gullerbility of any serious person suspecting me, especially on the evidence to hand. I envy you the olives & the sea above all I envy you that timeless air that gives one a chance to breathe & the imagination to work.2 Ahead lay nearly ten years of rootless travels and an exile’s travails. This being John Craxton, there was a lot of pleasure too; but, personally and professionally, he was adrift. He had always made pocket money trading antiques, and now he brokered the sale to the British Museum of a magnificent Phoenician bowl for £1500, living on his cut of the profit for quite some time. Pictures might be bartered – some for haircuts from the barber in Bloomsbury’s Russell Hotel – or sold for cash in different currencies. During one economic crisis he quipped that he had sold dollars and bought chairs. Money went further for John Craxton than for others, since he could live for free in his parents’ house and Essie’s purse was ever open. A master in the art of charming for his supper, he was a guest in the grandest houses, whose owners might also buy his pictures.

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Musician in Taverna, 1954 Gouache on card, 58.4 × 47 cm. Private collection

In 1967 he gave a painting entitled Musician in Taverna to British Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, for championing the Sexual Offences Act that began the legalisation of homosexuality. It was a rare mark of approval for a politician, but Roy and Jennifer Jenkins were also part of the Craxton social circuit: they shared a taste for fine living. Jennifer later chaired the Historic Buildings Council for England and then the National Trust – handling the houses of some of their chums. One was socialite Maud Russell, who with her late husband had gifted Mottisfont – a medieval priory beside the River Test in

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Hampshire – to the National Trust. Another was Christie’s silver specialist Charles Brocklehurst, who hosted John at Hare Hill in Cheshire and at Covent Garden operas. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, Andrew and Debo, issued invitations to Chatsworth. Visiting first an ex-guardsman in Sheffield, John was greeted at the gates of the Derbyshire estate by a disbelieving bowlerhatted flunky, who told him to hide his motorbike behind a tree. Cleared by a second bowler hat, he rode up to the house where, in a light-headed moment, he survived a flying leap down a stone staircase. He loved the Devonshires dearly – adding to the air of hilarity that always seemed to attend them. What fun to be granted the freedom of the house and its collections, with perusals of art treasures of his choice (Inigo Jones drawings) after lovely dinners. A Clouet portrait hung in his bedroom. He wandered through rooms adorned with Old Masters, before playing on a Steinway piano and praising its tone. ‘It was a gift from Michael Astor’, said the duke. ‘What a marvellous present!’ John said. ‘We gave him a Daimler’, the duke replied. John’s postcard to Janet had a deceptively ironic note: ‘The house is almost too much even for me & I took fright turned tail & made for Bakewell to have a tart & cuppa with the proletariat.’ There were also two visits to the Devonshires at Lismore, their romantic Irish estate in County Waterford. He wrote to the Wallers in Dorset: ‘Wonderfully blissfull life in the place with a huge bedroom with brass bed overlooking the river which runs under the castle walls, super turner scapes, warmest of hospitalities.’ Returning to Dublin on his motorbike, John called at The Bailey pub and recognised the deaf poet David Wright at the bar. Hailing an acquaintance from wartime Soho, he was launched into a typically Craxtonian escapade: David said he was there for Patrick Kavanagh’s funeral. I said, ‘Who’s Patrick Kavanagh?’ He said, ‘A very irascible Irish poet.’ I got reasonably drunk and said to the barman, ‘Here is one of England’s finest poets. He has come for the funeral of Patrick Kavanagh and no one’s here to meet him.’ So he got on the telephone and Kavanagh’s widow came rushing down, hair all over the place, high as a kite, and hauled both of us back to the wake where everyone was on hash, with this irascible dead poet lying in his coffin in the middle of the room.3 For the second Irish trip John drove from London with Annie Fleming, brilliant hostess and letter-writer. Her complicated love life had been simplified by the 1944 death in action of her husband, Lord O’Neill, into a rivalry between Viscount Rothermere and Ian Fleming. She married each in turn, but not happily. ‘Something seems to go wrong in the taxi from the registry office’, a friend noted.4 Annie recognised the truth in that remark. Sharp and witty in her judgements, she found John a ‘very agreeable’ travelling companion.

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In October 1968, at a lunch party in London, John met the Californian artist Don Bachardy and invited him for a studio visit. The two portraitists then drew one another. Don wrote to his partner, Christopher Isherwood: ‘John Craxton was very difficult to draw, a subtle mover. He is quite nice I think and even somewhat complimentary about my work. He suffers from a very usual kind of English smallness of mind and a self-protective sneer.’5 Neither warmed to the other’s art. As Don told Christopher: I went to John Craxton’s house today and got shown a lot of bad paintings which were horribly difficult to say anything positive about. He lives in Hampstead in a weird crazy-built Edwardian house with his old father and endless relative-type people. He did a drawing of me, quite like me only making me look a good 10 years younger. It’s not much good as a drawing.6 The relative types in Kidderpore Avenue included Janet and her husband, Alan Richardson, a Scottish composer 25 years her senior. Harold’s former pupil, he was now Professor of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music, where Janet was Professor of Oboe. They and Harold continued to teach at home and Essie to preside over a teeming assembly of relations, friends, students and strays (and relations and friends of students and strays): the spirit of Acomb Lodge would never die. One day an unknown woman joined the throng for lunch. Since no one was ever introduced, it was only later, when the visitor asked about the unexpected absence of the vicar, that her error was understood. She had mistaken the Craxton house for the vicarage further up the street. On retiring from the Royal Academy of Music, Harold had wanted to move near to his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams in Dorking, where he could write music in rural peace. Then Ralph confessed a desperation to return to London, and relief in finding a city base overlooking Regent’s Park. The countryside was blighted by noisy aeroplanes and lack of late-night trains ruled out concerts in the capital. So Harold and Essie stayed happily put. Essie continued to call on her network of helpfulness – when a cello student called Jacqueline du Pré needed accommodation in Paris while studying with Paul Tortelier, Mrs Craxton, of course, knew just the place. As well as being John’s favourite sibling, and the apple of her parents’ eyes, Janet was beloved across the musical world. She was the co-dedicatee and original performer with tenor Wilfred Brown of the Vaughan Williams song cycle Ten Blake Songs – the collaboration a delight to John. Lead oboist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Janet gave world premieres of new works by Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy, Priaulx Rainier and Alan Rawsthorne. John used a connection to the French cellist Maurice Gendron to meet the composer Jean Françaix and lobby on Janet’s behalf. He had just written an oboe piece for someone else, but offered her a cor anglais work, if she could

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Harold and Essie Craxton Christmas card, 1950s

play it. John said he was sure she could – and she duly did. In 1962 the siblings commissioned Sonatina for Oboe and Piano from Lennox Berkeley – John exchanging the piece for his painting Into the Ravine and starting a long friendship with the Berkeley family. Lennox wrote further pieces for Janet in 1967 and 1973, in a musical oeuvre John thought ‘both full of joy & also touched by a profound & beautifull melancholy’.7 There were travels abroad – for a Tuscan tour with Magouche, while staying with Maro and Matthew Spender at Avane near Pisa; to Amsterdam for art and sex; and to France in spring, where he reported to the Wallers: Paris is sparkling & clean with such sunlight it really looks so beautifull if only it were cheaper! Prices are astronomique – I’ve been allowed to have all the Watteau drawings out to study & they are incredible – also Delacroix etc. There is a sunny room on top of the Louvre full of pleasures. Loving high and low life liberally mixed, he patronised a new wave of London leather bars – notably the Coleherne in Earls Court – and their Amsterdam equivalents. In the Dutch city one night he recognised the masked figure of John Richardson, on a break from launching Christie’s in New York. In a typical Craxton prank – and perhaps in revenge on a former tormentor – he whispered to a burly companion to deliver a message. And so, one masked leather man whispered in the ear of another: ‘Aren’t you our man from Christie’s?’ John enjoyed the little jump of alarm he detected within a sex-club disguise. In 1970 he accompanied Michael and Judy Astor on their Kenyan honeymoon, sketching and painting monkeys, wildebeest and lions while

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on safari. Peter Pears bought a picture of a majestic old lion at a watering hole. It went to Aldeburgh when Benjamin Britten was starting work on the opera Death in Venice, adapting the Thomas Mann novella about an aged and blocked writer tormented by a vision of boyish beauty. The lion became a visual metaphor for the dying composer. It hung in the ground-floor study that Ben used when he could no longer climb the stairs to his former workroom until his death in 1976. John then wandered around the Mediterranean – searching for the next best thing to forbidden Greece. In spring 1971 he crossed Libya and Tunisia on a tour of ruins, sketching Arab boys in dusty streets, cafés and bus stations. In the Tunisian pilgrimage centre of Kairouan, hooded cloaks lent a note of nostalgia for the woollen capes worn by Cretan shepherds for cold nights on the White Mountains. He paid boys to act as go-betweens so that he could draw the locals in peace. Irritated that his money and gifts were received in silence, he asked one assistant why there were never words of thanks. The boy shook his head vigorously and said: ‘Every day I thank Muhammad for bringing you into my life.’ Pausing in Tunis for museum visits, John sent a postcard to George and Maro Seferis in Athens: ‘Wonderful cities by the dark seas huge Roman Hollywoods but full of mystery. Leptis & Sabratha & here in Tunisia Dougga Sbeitla etc’.8 More appealing than any Hollywood film star, a broad-shouldered, big-moustached and brilliantly uniformed Libyan police officer posed for

Lion Drinking, 1970 Oil on board, 45.5 × 59 cm. Britten Pears Arts, Aldeburgh

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John and his camera. The photo went into the Craxton album with the caption: ‘Leptis Magna policeman who never noticed I was taking lumps of red and green porphyry away with me tucked into my socks. He had peered into my bag [and] seen nothing.’ John had written to the Ghikas of being moved at Leptis by the sight of the remains of small temples and grand houses on the edge of the breaking surf: I found irresistible the extreme civilized elegance of those long courtyards with their columns of fine marble – the sea dark blue and white filling the silence with a soft roar. I was alone except for two small owls that followed me and roosted on the carved capitals. I loaded my pockets and bag with piles of green and red porphyry enough to complete my cosmati table and more, and all picked up off the beach!9 The trip was tinged with melancholy. John’s happiest moment was finding a berthed caique from Kalymnos. He talked freely in colloquial Greek to the crew of sponge divers, shared their raki and longed to stow away on the homeward voyage. Any port of Greece would do in this personal storm: all were closed to him. He was with 18-year-old Caspar Fleming, son of Annie and Ian Fleming, and Annie’s older daughter, Fionn. Caspar had been born in the year Ian published the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. His father, both doting and distant, wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for him, before dying of a heart attack on the boy’s 12th birthday. Caspar amassed art, antiques and an arsenal of weapons while at Eton, and was now on course to drop out of Oxford with a bipolar disorder, drug habit and death wish. John was not the ideal travelling companion for such a troubled soul, and some blamed him for the teenager’s drug-borne dissolution in North Africa once Fionn left for home. Accusations of neglect and abandonment hardened amid all that happened afterwards: saved after several suicide attempts, Caspar Fleming took a fatal overdose at the age of 23. Fionn Morgan found John wholly innocent in her brother’s self-destructive story – saying: ‘We just couldn’t keep him alive.’ 10 The following spring John went to Morocco with a fireman. They stayed with Rex de Charembac Nan Kivell, ex-managing director of the Redfern Gallery. The illegitimate, gay New Zealander was self-made – and selfnamed, having been born plain Reginald Nankivell. His home was now the former El Farah (Paradise) hotel, a building of beautiful archways overlooking Tangier’s medina, where John Lavery had painted. Save for magnificent pictures, the house was Spartan and bohemian. A flute-playing servant was known as ‘Keefi’ due to the hashish he was generally high on; Rex’s Algerian lover, adopted son and general factotum Mizouni drove host and guests to the beach in a Bentley convertible. Also present was the painter Patrick Procktor, who recalled:

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Seated Man, Rabat, 1972 Conté pencil on paper, 29 × 23 cm. Private collection

John … cooked a superb lunch of roasted aubergine, with Moroccan wine and bread dipped in olive oil … After the mint tea Rex’s servant played the flute and we were led by Johnny in a mad dance in full sunshine, Johnny excelling at Greek and Moroccan styles of dancing.11 Footloose but far from fancy free, John spent the early 1970s in what felt like a sustained period of mourning. For all the sporadic gaiety, he was deeply and lastingly shaken by three deaths at this time. The first loss was his long-term lover John Murphy, their attachment continuing when Spud married and fathered a daughter, Lynne. In between merry parties in the council flat, the two Johns took off on adventures of their own. There was always an illicit side to Spud Murphy, and when he died suddenly aged 33, John – no conspiracy theorist as a rule – suspected dark deeds. In a later letter he confided to Lynne a belief that her father had been ‘bumped off because he talked too much’. Lynne was to discover, hidden under floorboards, photos of aeroplanes and control panels, hinting that Anthony Blunt’s chauffeur also dabbled in espionage. He had two passports and was always making notes and talking quietly into tape recorders. A stranger appeared after Spud’s funeral and had soon moved in with his widow. He took the dead man’s place for a while until vanishing into thin air. One by one the Craxton and Freud pictures disappeared from the walls of the flat – stolen or sold to pay bills – until all had gone.

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The second blow came on 30 March 1971, when Harold Craxton died just before his 86th birthday. Retired from the Royal Academy of Music for a decade, he had continued to receive pupils privately. Harold and Essie remained fixtures at music festivals and competitions at home and abroad. A memorial concert featured soloists Vladimir Ashkenazy, Janet Craxton, Clifford Curzon, Denis Matthews, Yehudi Menuhin and Nina Milkina. The Harold Craxton Memorial Trust was set up to support young musicians and continues its work as the Craxton family charity today. And, on 20 September, George Seferis died in Athens. For all his independence as a poet, he was an unswerving democrat and patriot. Two years before his death he had issued a sonorous defence of freedom – as a soloist, and not in a chorus. The denunciation of the Greek junta on the BBC World Service was a clarion call. Huge crowds followed the coffin, singing the banned Theodorakis setting of the Seferis poem ‘Denial’. Maro Seferis cut off her hair and threw it into the grave. A little more of Greece died in John’s exiled heart. Hard up as usual, John accepted an offer of a one-off show at the Hamet Gallery – almost opposite the Leicester Galleries. It was a measure of his naivety that he failed to see ructions ahead. Oliver Brown’s son spied lots of red spots – actually denoting works not for sale – and issued a writ for a debt of £200. Essie paid. The Leicester Galleries lifeline was finally severed and there would be no more Craxton exhibitions in London for over a decade. In 1972 a Whitechapel survey called Painting, Sculpture and Drawing in Britain 1940 –49 divided its contributors into Independents, Realists, Post-Surrealists and Neo-Romantics. John was dismayed to find himself, together with Lucian, tied to the last and worst label. He had grown to hate the art world. Retired to London, the Nortons came to his aid once more, by commissioning him to design a waterfall for their Carlyle Square garden. Enlarged from a clay maquette, he re-created a Cretan ravine. As ever, life brought gifts of compensation. In a London cinema, in 1973, John met 24-year-old Richard Riley – from Staffordshire farming stock and on course for a career as an antiques dealer. They would be partners, on and off and on again, for the rest of John’s life. Magouche, visiting Lincoln Cathedral with the writer David Garnett, her lover of the moment, met John and Richard and motorbike by chance in the street – ‘two heroic gents in black leather, with helmets underneath their arms, looking like two Saint Georges in a painting’.12 Now in his fifties, John Craxton was going at life hell for leather.

Richard Riley by John Craxton

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ATHENS OF THE NORTH

The Burlington Magazine reviewer of John Craxton’s Whitechapel show had noted: ‘His pictures, particularly the large ones, are lyrical; but they are also soft. Almost every one of them would make a beautiful tapestry.’ Damning with faint praise, the writer delivered a great idea. John had been deeply impressed by traditional Cretan weaving and his brightening palette had reflected most especially the pigment and patterning of vibrant rugs woven on Manoussakis family looms in the workshop behind Moschon. It was all material for a picture of Aegean life now so sorely missed. So a University of Stirling commission to work with the Edinburgh Tapestry Company (now Dovecot Weavers) was welcome indeed. For nearly three years John enjoyed the Scottish capital but never ceased longing for Greece; and he loathed the cold, grey and wet climate. ‘They call it the Athens of the North’, he jested. ‘I call it the Inverness of the South.’ He and Richard found a small first-floor flat at 186 Rose Street – between Prince’s Street and George Street in an ungrand part of the New Town. Three-storey Georgian rubble houses had been converted to a street of ground-floors pubs. Teenagers tried to sink a beer in every Rose Street bar but few made it to the end of the Amber Mile. The Craxton tapestry was to mark the tenure of scientist T.L. Cottrell as Stirling University’s first vice-chancellor. John devised and rejected several Aegean schemes. One hung several tapestries close together in any order. Professor Cottrell endorsed a plan that the artist deemed ‘more complex and ambitious and nearer my heart’. The idea was to incorporate the natural elements into one working whole, each interacting with the others. In the gorgeously hued and interwoven design, Earth is delineated by rocks, leaves and trees, Air by a flying bird, Water by rain, waterfall and fish-rife sea, and Fire by sun-sparked flames in a fig tree and smoke swirling into clouds. John wrote: The sun is symbolised as the origin of life, hence the yin yang fish, as well as its geometry and order. The Moon presides over that area which is elegiac in feeling which, tragically, became a Memorial to Tom Cottrell. The centre is a hidden ‘pun’ in which a rampant goat has metamorphosed itself into a tree: it has become what it eats and, rising too close to the sun, has caught on fire. As in nature, all is changing but the narrative should not be read but seen and felt: everyone is free to interpret what he sees in his own way. The moon and the sun represent day and night to dominate the whole. Incidentally, the moon is partially eclipsed by the Earth.1

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Landscape with the Elements, 1975– 6 Tapestry, 423 × 492 cm. University of Stirling

The tapestry had archaic influences – the sun’s shape suggested by Iron Age sun discs in an Irish museum; the rhythms of vegetation derived from spiral growth patterns in Bronze Age stone carvings. Chiefly the composition was a tribute to the blue and golden, mythic and metamorphic atmosphere of Crete. It is tempting to read into that image of the burning goat a self-portrait of an artist regretting the devilment that had pitched him into northern exile. John Craxton never cared for short cuts, and his working process could seem unduly contorted via experimentation with medium and method as he went along. This could mean a nightmare for others in a joint enterprise. A vast tempera cartoon was both a blueprint and a striking painting in its own right, but not a scale drawing. Senior weaver Douglas Grierson, who had just worked with Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson and Edinburgh-born Eduardo Paolozzi, recalled the demanding task of conveying many stippled areas and patterns of small brush strokes. There was ‘true collaboration’ but frustration too. John left passages partly unresolved to encourage the makers to invent patterns and stitches. Weaving techniques to harden or soften a shape and vary texture were readily agreed; disputes recurred over the key question of colour. Douglas said: He thought that adding white to a colour would brighten it but in fact you just add more white. What you do is find a brighter colour in the range. It is the weaver’s job to pick the colours … What was perfectionism for him became interference for us.2

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One of the largest and trickiest tapestries produced by the Edinburgh workshop, the Craxton project needed six weavers and a heavy, rich weave. The biggest challenge, however, was in a colour range taking the centre’s full palette of 500 hues. Too many mornings started with an unpicking of the previous day’s work. Plus, the garrulous designer told so many stories that lunch and coffee breaks merged as the weaving firm watched its finances unravelling. The work begun in 1975 was finally completed the following year. Collaborations with John Piper, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney concluded around that time after a lot less trouble. Powerful support came from Douglas Hall, first director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, who oversaw a Craxton retrospective at Stirling University’s MacRobert Arts Centre Gallery, then bought three works (including the tapestry cartoon) for his Edinburgh museum. Douglas viewed John as ‘a beacon of sense and sensibility’ – a painter who ‘knew all about modernism and used just enough of it to serve his expressive purpose, and no more’.3 He also served his expressive purpose by racing off on his motorbike – up into Fife, over the bridge spanning the Firth of Forth; down into the Borders. Janet and Alan now owned Latch Cottage at Gifford in the Lammermuir Hills of East Lothian. In a happy coincidence, John’s old friend Gian Carlo Menotti had also moved to Gifford – buying Yester House, an eighteenth-century mansion built for the Marquess of Tweeddale and calling himself Mr Mcnotti. After critical attack in America, he wanted to cut off from his past. The severing included the sale of a house shared with Samuel Barber since 1943. Depressive and alcoholic, Sam had been left unable to work, but there was ultimately a reconciliation and he stayed at Yester House in the months before his death in January 1981. John and Gian Carlo admired the acoustics of the Yester House ballroom in interiors designed by William Adam and his son Robert. It made a perfect setting for a Craxton commission from the Hope Scott Trust. He was to decorate a harpsichord made by John Barnes of Edinburgh, in the seventeenth-century style of Andreas Ruckers of Antwerp, for the Scottish Baroque Ensemble. Over the spring and summer of 1976 John painted in Rose Street an abstracted design of clouds, rocks and trees for the underside of the half-opened lid. A Craxtonised version of the marbling effect seen on the prized Ruckers instrument in Traquair House, home of the Stuart family in the Scottish Borders since 1491, Painted harpsichord, 1976 Tempera on wood, 216 × 89 × 30.5 cm. Private collection

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was then added to the case. The collaboration was firmly pushed by Douglas Hall, but he recalled: ‘I thought the finished case was a very beautiful object. Unfortunately I underestimated the extreme conservatism of musicians in visual matters, at least as concerns their instruments, and the ensemble it was made for accepted it only with reluctance.’4 The most acceptable part of the harpsichord project was the fee, for John’s finances were now seriously strained. He was kept afloat by £500 legacies from his godmother Rebecca Birkett, the widow of British Museum director Tom Kendrick, and Charles Brocklehurst. Maud Russell said that she had intended to leave him £1,000 but was passing on the money immediately. These were useful sums at a time when a pint of Guinness cost 20p in an Edinburgh pub. Still, his memories of the tapestry project were darkened by financial problems and a belief that he had not been properly paid. John’s painting was not going too well; though in his Rose Street digs he occasionally revived the atmosphere of the Chania studio, with inspired portraits – such as a drawing of Charles Findlay and a tempera study of Scottish fusilier Louis Claes eating yoghurt. He painted Highland cattle in mock tribute to the London-residing John MacWhirter and in sham nostalgia for St John’s Wood. Jokes aside, Richard Riley watched pictures falling victim to the anxious uncertainties of what the artist called ‘procraxtonation’. Roland Penrose kindly included him in an exhibition in Japan. The colours in a huge painting of goats changed daily until halted by a delivery deadline. When the work was returned to the studio, John and Richard destroyed it. John had picked up Charlie Findlay at a bus stop, offering a lift home on his motorbike but then saying he needed to call at his flat first. The passenger expected a gay pass that never came; they talked until 3am. Such meetings with John Craxton could be social or sexual or both: possibility hung in the air and might remain there. The image of a Craxton action man, Charlie had served in the Merchant Navy and Territorial Army. After roaming abroad he married and became a London fireman, based in the Arts and Crafts Belsize Park station near Kidderpore Avenue. John, admiring the fire station and the firemen, dropped in for cups of tea. Following the coup in Greece, Stanley Seeger had moved to harbours and houses elsewhere, including a villa on Lanzarote. In 1973 John joined him there, writing to Amy: ‘I haven’t known such a feeling of well being for 6 years, its probably the sun & so much to draw & soak in visually.’ On the starkest Canary Isle he warmed to the strange sight of camels and peasants toiling in a black moonscape, where each man-made crater held a single dew-watered fig bush or vine. Lava dust was added At Belsize Park fire station to the pigment for gritty pictures. Some reflected

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Moonlit Ravine, early 1970s Tempera and volcanic dust on board, 142.2 × 60 cm. Private collection

the harshness of life on Lanzarote. The best pondered the hardness of life in exile, with volcanic particles gleaming darkly in elegiac Cretan shadows of the artist’s beloved Aradaina Gorge – between the Sfakian mountain village of Anopoli and the Libyan Sea. Also in 1973, John made a clandestine trip to Greece – going with actress Peggy Ashcroft to stay with the Ghikas on Corfu; entering on a ferry from Italy under the cover of a tourist boom. It was bliss and agony. On a late summer boat trip with Barbara’s son, Jacob Rothschild, the Ghikas had spotted a

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half-ruined olive press on a hill above the little harbour of Kouloura and looking across the strait to Albania. Ripe for restoration, the building was bought by Jacob as an artist’s retreat for his stepfather and a base for family and friends. In a setting more lush and mellow than Hydra, the emerging house was a mixture of those at Kamini and Kardamyli, with an elegance of its own. It was to be surrounded by romantic gardens ranged amid mosaic terraces and courtyards. Normally John would have assisted Nico, Barbara, Joan and Paddy in plotting and planning; but his input had been limited to letters, phone calls and poring over photos in London. The evolution of this lovely house became a benchmark for his distance from Greece. After a brief and anxious holiday under the radar of a paranoid but helpfully inept regime, the torture of absence was worse than ever. In May 1972, in Soho, John had fallen in with a maudlin Francis Bacon at the French pub bar. John Deakin had died in Brighton and Francis was furious at having to identify the body since he was named as next of kin. Watching a barman put prices on a blackboard, a dejected painter asked: ‘What’s life about? We’re chalked in and sponged out?’ Testing times. Craxton paintings continued to evoke Aegean themes but with an increasingly mournful note. During interludes in London between 1973 and 1981 he now experimented with an uplifting new medium – ceramic. A satisfying collaboration flowed from friendship with the potter Ann Stokes. John was a regular presence at her kitchen table in Church Row, Hampstead, and now they worked happily side by side in an adjoining studio. John told Ann the shape of the plates he wanted – with wide rims for decoration, and an overall thought that the design should enhance the food. His ideas were based on English Delft, with brush flicks of warm colour and a sense of shoots, leaves and seaweed. Even these abstracted wares were redolent of Greece. Ann threw and John painted – with £5 pieces split £3-£2 in the painter’s favour. They made a variety of plates, bowls and dishes, the last as gifts to the musicians playing at Essie’s memorial service. Dinner services went to Janet Craxton and art collectors Sir Robert and Lisa Sainsbury. The biggest commission kitted out a Greek restaurant in Hendon.

Plates by Ann Stokes and John Craxton, 1970 Painted ceramic, maximum diameter 25.5 cm. Private collection

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40 A TIME OF GIFTS

Personalities of the Greek junta kept shifting in a macabre game of musical chairs, as policies altered from martial law to more capricious oppression. When strongman George Papadopoulos was ousted, late in 1973, the sinister new power behind the presidency, Dimitrios Ioannidis, plotted a final act of hubris. The assassination of Archbishop Makarios was to bring the union of Cyprus with Greece; but, in July 1974, the Cypriot leader escaped from his burning palace, Turkish forces invaded 40 per cent of the island and the humiliated despots of Athens gave way to restored Greek democracy. For once John watched a political situation closely, but any hope that he would return with other exiles was quickly dashed. The policing and judicial framework behind seven years of dictatorship was not so easily dismantled, and John’s name remained on a list of undesirables. Stanley Seeger, with influential contacts in Athens and Crete, pressed for an amnesty. Konstantinos Mitsotakis, back from Paris, helped too. But the grudge of a police officer in Chania, and those rumours of espionage typed in a security file, ran deep into the administrative fabric of Greece. One philhellene was still unwelcome. After another two years of lobbying by his friends, John was finally able to return to Greece – taking Richard and calling at Athens and then on the Mastropetros family on Poros on the way to Crete. At first glance the gently crumbling character of Chania seemed unaltered, but there had been a blitzing of bohemians. Allen Bole was dead and Charles Haldeman was locked in legal battles. Dorothy Andrews had married Nikos Stavroulakis in order to claim a Greek passport and stay put and Betty Ryan had moved on to calmer Andros, where, through ensuing decades, she painted abstracted landscapes populated by tame and wild animals, chain-smoked and poured out letters to old friends. Fred Perles and his wife had been expelled. They lived on Cyprus for a few years until displaced by the Turkish invasion when all the writer’s papers were looted and lost. Friends enabled an onward move to Somerset suburbia. Fred changed his name to Alfred Barret but kept his sense of humour. It had protected him all along. At the back of Dorothy’s building, in the courtyard above Lithinon Street, there was now the haven of the Hogan house. Kilkenny-raised Eileen Ryan, coming to Chania as an English tutor, had met American diver Harold Hogan – Ernest Hemingway’s double – on the beach at Stavros. Ousted under the Colonels, Eileen and Hoge were again providing a refuge for feline and human waifs. One lodger was CIA agent turned novelist Edward Whittemore, who

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Jacket for A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1977

wrote part of his Jerusalem Quartet at their table. His haunted presence fuelled rumours of intrigue in the naval town that returning democracy did not dispel. Going home to Chania was among the greatest gifts of John’s life, and he set about working with renewed vigour and insightful imagination on what may yet be seen as his best paintings. The moment is captured in the finest of the book jackets for Paddy Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts, recalling the author’s youthful walk across Europe. Richard Riley posed with a rucksack for the figure entering a world of promise. The traffic of naval conscripts through 1 Moschon was now resumed – positively increasing when the law changed so that ordinary clothes were allowed in place of military uniforms during social outings. While this diminished the aesthetics of the harbour from John Craxton’s point of view, there was a silver lining to the discarded blue and white tunics and trousers, many of which were now removed and stored in his studio until partying sailors changed back when returning to their ships. He also acquired motley sets and mismatches of uniforms for his models. The line of caps and helmets that had unnerved wartime visitors to John and Lucian in Abercorn Place was now replicated in Moschon, alongside an awesome array of shepherds’ and soldiers’ boots. One new friend and neighbour was Ross Daly, who had called in on Crete en route to India and stayed to become the foremost exponent of the Cretan lyra.

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Both he and John drove BMW motorbikes and were similarly rumoured to be spies. Heading for a sketching sortie in the hills, John would shout to Ross that he was off to do some cartography, well aware that the false admission of mapping would fuel the whispering campaign against him. He loved to shock. If there was an elephant trap around he would leap right in. John was relieved to find the Cretans as over-the-top as ever. Superstition prevailed but, to prove that he had no fear, one local lad in the Craxton circle stole a skull in its box from a churchyard ossuary. He put it under his bed, where his mother found it – and screamed on recognising a relative’s name on the box. The skull was hastily reburied but a dog dug it up again. John relished a front seat in a Greek comedy, before remembering, now and then, that he had work to do. Building renovation recommenced and a rising tide of handsome young labourers, who might be sailors or fishermen, did odd jobs, while semiprofessionals were entrusted with specialist and structural work. In 1977 the suitably good-looking Photis and Andreas electrified the house in every sense while being drawn and painted. Constant comings and goings upset John’s nearest neighbour – who banged with a broom on her kitchen ceiling, also John’s bedroom floor, to end the late-night revelry. Katina Dandaroulaki had looked after the children of the Casa Delfina hotel owners and they had given her a retirement flat on the harbour. Now she was between loud restaurants and Casa Craxton. Gradually John’s charm won her over. They shared food via a pulley before Katina hosted many of John’s lunch and dinner parties in her flat. John insisted on Greek being spoken, to keep her included. At first she had been baffled by the flow of young men, and then seemed to accept that John came from a very large family since each visitor was introduced as a cousin. In the end she did not care: she loved him and welcomed his friends whoever they were. There was a maternal touch to her devotion, though she would have married him if only he had asked. Essie Craxton’s death, in November 1977, was a hammer blow for all her family. John was 55 and had never ceased to take her handouts and shelter in the safe house she made a home and haven for everyone. Her handbag was a microcosm of the house, from which gifts were endlessly retrieved. Wherever John might be, just to know that Essie was willing him on and ever ready to help him back on his feet after any mishap made the world benevolent. He helped her too. In latter years she drove a part-timbered Morris Minor Traveller – an old banger repainted by John Craxton. Essie had such perfect manners that it might have been unclear how far her tolerance of John’s wayward ways – and all the follies and foibles around her – was due to naivety. At one point the Craxton boarding house in Kidderpore Avenue had moved closer to a bordello, with a room rented to a woman who evidently entertained male callers in bed. Rhythmic creaking echoed through the uninsulated building one afternoon, reaching the sitting room where two elderly sisters were taking tea. Essie stayed silent. Amy, up from the country, cried: ‘Who’s sawing wood?’ John knew for sure that his mother loved him as

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he was, with boundless devotion rooted in worldly wisdom. Essie had once walked into his bedroom when he was entangled with Spud Murphy. ‘Haven’t you two got over that yet?’ she asked, with no embarrassment nor expectation of an answer. She was a rare human being: almost unshockable and wholly good. John made a black lithograph in her memory. For a memorial concert Lennox Berkeley arranged ‘Elegy for String Orchestra’, with a dedication to Essie and the Craxton family; his composer son, Michael, arranged ‘Among the Lilies’ for brass from an original chorale. Essie’s death sparked a crisis in Antony Craxton. The figure of respectability and responsibility crumpled. His departure from the BBC after questionable expenses was disguised as early retirement; his candour over the collapse of his marriage was startling: a homophobe had been homosexual all along. Having suffered as a result of his older brother’s hang-ups all his life, John was too enraged for compassion, especially as the new Antony was even more infuriating than the old. He acquired a string of dodgy boyfriends; one dealt drugs from their shared flat and caused him to hide in Kidderpore Avenue after an incident with a gun. His finances ever more chaotic, his establishment copybook was blotted forever when letters from the royal family were offered for sale. Craxton family fortunes hit rock bottom in July 1981 when, painting on Crete, John received shattering news. Janet had suffered a fatal heart attack, aged 52, 11 days before she was due to play at the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. She and John had been the closest of conspirators as the two artists among the Craxton siblings – he had always admired her serious containment and known how to lighten it with winning wit. Long ago, he had written from Athens: Antony turned up last night & we go to Poros today & then to Hydra lets hope A has better luck. He twiddled a knob in Venice one night and remarked on the excellent oboe playing that was to be found on the Continent but it was only you after all! John had taken trouble to attend Janet’s concerts and hear her broadcasts, and she had been a stalwart presence at his exhibitions. They had travelled together – visiting Brittany to see the prehistoric standing stones at Carnac, and touring to Treboul and Concarneau ‘to experience the deep essence that Christopher Wood had transformed into paintings of the landscape and sea’.1 Both were perfectionists – Janet made her reeds, John mixed his pigments – abhorring pretension. They scorned critics since they were both fiercely selfcritical. Janet sent back her fee in disgust at one performance; John’s agonies over finishing a painting could re-double for a blank canvas. For the BBC World Service equivalent of Desert Island Discs he chose the 1937 Bunny Berigan jazz classic ‘I Can’t Get Started’. Amused by the last line of the Ira Gershwin lyric, ‘With queens I’ve à la carted, but with you I can’t get started’, he also enjoyed an ironic dig at his own (non-)work.

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It had been thrilling for John when, in 1979, Janet joined the Royal Opera House orchestra – bringing the possibility that one day they might collaborate on a Covent Garden ballet. Now so much potential was abruptly snuffed out – the scale of the loss suggested, a decade later, when a dozen British composers (including Richard Rodney Bennett, Harrison Birtwhistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Oliver Knussen and Michael Tippett) wrote pieces, for free, for a concert in her memory. Janet’s death came at a dire moment for John financially, but all his emotional resources were spent. He could not face the journey home for his sister’s funeral even if he could have afforded the fare. Robin was Janet’s executor. He put Kidderpore Avenue on the market – knowing that Janet had wanted a sale, on a rare point of disagreement with John, and claiming that stress over the house had killed her. When he heard what was happening, John hit the roof – then allied with brother Michael and his wife Alisi to buy out Tim, Robin and Janet’s estate. Michael was the kindest Craxton sibling and his wife was a kindred spirit. Alisi had grown up in a magnificent German schloss before fleeing the Soviet advance. She cherished the familiar feeling of creative haven at Kidderpore Avenue – and would be delighted, later, when her daughter Jane took over the running of the Harold Craxton Memorial Trust. Now Alisi’s inheritance and a joint mortgage saved the day, though John further assisted by warning prospective purchasers of rampaging rot and rodents. Mightily relieved when the house was saved, he rarely spoke to Robin from then on. There was to be one more sting in the tale. Even though Antony was still hiding in the family home from creditors and other enemies, he began to press for its sale to solve his financial crisis. John, so often dithering or burying his head in Cretan sand, then moved decisively. He bought out his pesky brother – by selling his cherished William Blake picture to the Tate. Loving London salerooms as much as museums, John was friendly with experts in various fields. One was Christopher Cone, a handsome Yorkshire man who shone in the Victorian pictures department at Sotheby’s. They met in a bar, in 1979, while John was staying in Stanley Seeger’s mews house in Mayfair. He then introduced the two men. The trio flew in Stanley’s private aeroplane to Greece, where Stanley and Christopher became inseparable. Back in England they bought Sutton Place, John Paul Getty’s former home in Surrey, for £8 million – a British property record. There were other bases in other countries, but this Grade I-listed Tudor mansion was the jewel in the Seeger-Cone collection. Stanley formed brilliant art assemblages before selling and starting again. Francis Bacon’s 1979 triptych Studies of the Human Body hung in orange splendour in the Great Hall at Sutton Place – not being let go until 2001, long after the house. They toured the oceans aboard Rosenkavalier, a stately yacht and floating art gallery. For something more intimate, they sailed on Rosa, a converted Canary Isle cod fishing boat. A painting commissioned soon after the couple got together was first exhibited as Portrait, to respect the Seeger-Cone passion for privacy. In the closest John Craxton ever came to an overtly sexual image, a man is shown astride a

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Portrait of Christopher Cone, 1981–5 Tempera on canvas, 120 × 90 cm. Private collection

traditional Cretan chair in the manner of the notorious photo of naked call-girl Christine Keeler on a fashionable Arne Jacobsen chair. Clad from boots to cap in Greek army uniform, the male model also wears an inscrutable expression. It is a portrait of Christopher Cone, based, unusually, on a photo. The figure sits in a bare room with a high window suggesting a prison cell. The opening on to an Aegean sky is framed like a picture – a subtle tribute to two partners embarked on what would prove to be 32 years of travelling, collecting and philanthropy. Like dawning enlightenment, sunlight is already flooding in from a doorway beyond the painting. Meanwhile, a difficult decade ended on a high note when, in October 1979, John flew to New York on Stanley’s jet. He loved everything on his first and last trip to the USA: the big city buzz, the friendly people, the gay abandon in the calm before an inconceivable storm. Unmasking the modernity of the ‘Cycladic’ harpist in the Metropolitan Museum was the cream on a delectable American pie. Later, the unmasker was certain that if he had stayed for more than one taste, he would not have survived.

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THE LAST OF LUCIAN

In 1969 the faltering friendship of Lucian Freud and John Craxton foundered over a painting. Almost from their first meeting, in 1941, each had enjoyed the privilege of being allowed to comment on the other’s pictures in progress. Perhaps, given their independent natures and increasing separation, such criticism came more and more to bolster a resolution to carry on regardless. In any case, it relied on a thinning plank of trust. The board gave way when John voiced his view that the child sprawled on the floor in Lucian’s picture Large Interior, Paddington – the artist’s daughter, Isobel Boyt – did not fit with the plant dominating the composition. He said that the perspective was awry and the figure should be painted out. His verdict met with stony silence. There would be no more studio calls: ‘Lucian had suggested that we should meet up for sausage and chips, so I went to [his studio] as arranged and whistled from the street as I always did. But there was no answer. He didn’t open the door.’ There were fitful meetings after that – one when Lucian called John in to support his belief that he had discovered an unrecognised work by Giorgio de Chirico. He was most put out when John disagreed: What he didn’t like about me was that I wasn’t going to be a yes man. I never was. That’s why the relationship was so good. He had always asked my opinion about everything, and very often I had told him that what he was doing was wonderful. Because it really was. Later they met by chance at a party, almost certainly given by Annie Fleming, and Lucian said he needed to talk. So he got on the back of John’s motorbike, and they went for a supper of scrambled eggs at Aspinall’s gambling club in Mayfair. It was a suitable choice by Lucian, not only because he had taught John how to scramble eggs: ‘He said he had a terrible confession to make. He had been forced to sell some of the pictures I had given him because he was desperate for money. I said I quite understood.’ John had not quite understood the degree of Lucian’s desperation, learning only later that he was in hock to East End thugs the Kray Twins due to vast gambling debts. It would have made no difference. The donor anyway contended that since his youthful pictures were Lucian’s property it was up to him what he did with them. Both Lucian and Francis Bacon were fascinated by criminal virility. When John warned Francis that certain dealers were tantamount to gangsters, he replied: ‘But my dear, I love gangsters.’ John said that Francis had been less keen

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when, in the process of prosecuting a studio thief, he was visited by Ronnie Kray and told that his painting arm would be broken unless he dropped the action. The lawyer was called at once. Even without encouragement, Lucian had always been swift to call a lawyer. He became more litigious as time went on and his resources and resentments mounted. It was ‘always one law for Lucian and another for everyone else’. When John was struggling with one of his many cash crises, a collector told him that she was mad about early Freud drawings and if ever fortunate enough to buy any, she would never sell them on. He let her have ‘a whole lot of quite small drawings, for £80 I think’. She passed them to the Crane Kalman Gallery, to collect a considerable profit. Andras Kalman then asked Lucian to add his signature – having already bought Craxton sketches from him for bets (‘Went into Kalman’s. Something for the 2.30.’1). In a fury, Lucian insisted that the drawings were fiddled with or completely faked, but he did write on them – messages such as ‘John Craxton is a cunt’. A day or two later John received the first of several solicitor’s letters. The sender was Arnold Goodman – a gargantuan figure who posed for the 1987 Freud etching Lord Goodman in Yellow Pyjamas while breakfasting in bed, since he was too busy to sit during the day. Fixer for the rich, famous and powerful, the legal baron and major committee mainstay was known to his aristocratic clients as ‘Goody’. Private Eye called him ‘Two Dinners Goodman’ since his size proved that, as busily as he attended to the legal affairs of others, he never missed a regal meal for himself. Lord Goodman made for a doughty ally and a daunting foe. John pitched Charles Rubens, the Craxtons’ former Grove End Road neighbour and ongoing family friend, against Goodman – paying for his services with a picture. Accusations and denials flew. For all the attempts at intimidation, John was never sued. Threats alone could very often work – as Lucian found when haranguing the Fine Art Society over a Craxton portrait of ‘Lucian’ at an art fair. Insisting it was not of him at all, he got the work withdrawn. The bond between John and Lucian had been based in part on their differences. ‘The fact he wasn’t like me at all was all the more reason to get on’, John said. Where John was private, Lucian could be secretive to the point of paranoia; and sexually they were always miles apart: He was mad about Sloane Rangers with long blond hair. If he made a pass at them and they turned him down, he’d say they were frigid. If they slept with

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him, he’d say they were whores: they couldn’t win. He wasn’t Freudian for nothing. He was determined to deflower as many women as possible. He had set his cap at Caroline Blackwood, knowing that she had Guinness money, as well as being a beauty and talented too, when he was living with Kitty. Caroline’s mother realised Lucian was after her and sent her to Madrid to keep her out of his clutches. But Lucian cheated Stephen Spender and got the money to get there and proposed to her there. They set up house in Dorset but by that time Lucian and I had really parted company. He didn’t want me to meet any of his grand, rich friends. That started very early on. It wasn’t until 1951 that I got into society through Margot Fonteyn. He was very surprised to see me at a dinner party of Annie Fleming’s. For all their divergence, John said that there had always been deference between them based on mutual respect. That had allowed them freely to criticise each other’s work, until that shared esteem slowly frayed. When it had finally snapped, Lucian did all he could to besmirch John’s name; but the only friend to be lost through that campaign of disparagement was Annie Fleming. Conflict with Lucian was a red rag to a Christopher Hull bull. Since John was generally absent, and mostly on Crete, the art dealer had the run of his London studio and store in the 1980s, and was empowered to sell pictures of his choice. He saw a profitable exhibition in John’s extensive archive of early Craxton and Freud drawings and his contrary and confrontational nature made the risk of a legal challenge a further draw. An injunction was threatened and ignored. So a 1984 exhibition, showing works clearly by two separate hands and others in which youthful allies had combined in friendly exercises, went ahead with great success. The Goodman letters ceased. From now on John delighted in correcting the flow of books and catalogues on Lucian Freud, amending many given dates of pictures and questioning the artist’s flow of recollected anecdotes – dismissing some as partial concoctions

A Freud Figure in a Craxton Landscape, 1944 Ink on paper, 20.4 × 25.4 cm. Private collection

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and others as pure fabrications. For him the ‘wilful distortion’ of early Freudian art had now consumed the artist. In 1997, at the exhibition Lucian Freud: Early Works at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, the seminal image The Painter’s Room was dated to 1944. A catalogue note revealed this to have been the artist’s first picture completed at Delamere Terrace. A flying bomb that autumn had blown in studio windows while the painting was in progress, but it had escaped damage since the easel was at right angles to the shattering glass. Such precise memories. All fiction, John Craxton said. He had watched the production of The Painter’s Room in Abercorn Place in 1943, having first insisted that for once Lucian should start with a preparatory drawing to plot disparate elements including the zebra head. Was this a flaw of Freudian recall or careful calculation? Of course, two people can recall a single event very differently, but John perceived a wilful attempt to purge his involvement from the picture. Unaware of any enmity, Judith Bumpus invited him to appear on a BBC Radio 3 profile for Lucian’s 1988 Hayward Gallery retrospective, and he replied: I hope you will forgive me for not helping you over your programme about Lucian Freud. One day perhaps with time the memories, facts, etc can be gathered together. Lucian is a dab hand at smokescreening his past – the sort of thing Stalin was so good at! I myself deplore the way that facts concerning his early years have been distorted & omitted by serious critics aided and abetted by the painter. But does all this matter much? He hangs well in his self made private angst academy – not to my liking I admit. His recent nudes are curiously repellent which is odd since he claims he is obsessed with them. They end up looking like trophies. As he once said ‘a painter makes real to others his innermost feelings about all he cares for’ his innermost feelings reveal a misogynist to my eyes.2 In fact it mattered a great deal to John Craxton, for he was out of his league here. Lucian was a serial feudster, delighting in vilifying former friends. The writer Francis Wyndham was both distressed and impressed by a singular line in vituperation at multiple targets – noting how Lucian would ‘mount an elaborate, imaginative case against the accused which might be arbitrary and unfair but which was pitched to such an extreme level of fastidious distaste that it fleetingly acquires a semblance of poetic truth’.3 Lucian’s strategy of blitzkrieg surely refuted John’s counter-offensive claiming that he had come to lack all imagination. The last word on his former friend still ran like this: He’s full of ideas, very individual, marvellous memory, totally unpredictable, very quick with a good eye and highly intelligent – all the things you’d want in a friend. But he has no imagination. He has to be in front of his model the whole time. He has a terrifically strong personality but unfortunately lacks any character. He’s egotistical and ruthless and unnecessarily vindictive too.

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John himself could deploy the weapon of withering wit, while also retaining the sense of devilment that had bonded two anarchic pranksters in the first place. Nevertheless, he was essentially a loyalist. His friends were mostly for life, and some became alarmed by his sense of betrayal. Magouche said: ‘I used to worry about Johnny’s obsession with Lucian. It lasted until the day he died and did not diminish. It poisoned his life and stopped him from working as he had done before the break.’4 Natasha Spender, who knew a lot about the way Lucian transformed friends into fiends, since one prey was her husband, added: The break with Lucian poisoned Johnny’s whole life. One understands the depths of Johnny’s feelings – the betrayal of a former friendship is a treachery that is hard to forgive – but he should not have let him live rent-free in his brain. Lucian tried to ruin his reputation for probity. The difference between them was that there was absolutely no harm in Johnny and everyone was having equivocal experiences very often with Lucian.5 Great art may emerge from a state of overwhelming passion, and perhaps Lucian Freud needed unwonted depths of animosity to fuel phenomenal creativity. As an octogenarian he could still work for ten hours a day, standing and constantly moving, attacking maybe four canvases in two studios. No wonder he said that ‘All my patience has gone into my work, leaving none for my life’.6 Jane Howard had understood how, for Lucian Freud, art came first: I always felt that Lucian was a very cold person. He was perfectly nice to me, but when I met him I was 17 or 18 and really John’s friend. The last time I saw him was in the 1950s. I had very little money but decided I wanted a coat the colour of lemon peel and found the material and a tailor off Baker Street. One day I was wearing it, getting into a cab, and he stopped in his tracks and waved. I knew it was the colour that had caught him.7 And yet, early in the twenty-first century, a house owner in Kensington Church Street was nonplussed each morning to find a ground-floor window smeared with grey slurry. Eventually he discovered that the culprit was not a pigeon but Lucian Freud, post-breakfast at Clarke’s Restaurant, gobbing when passing the house where Kitty had lived half a century earlier.8 There is a strange kind of art in extreme emotion forever sustained. In the end the sour taste of the hatred between John and Lucian defined the sweetness of the love at the start. A word game enjoyed by the Craxtons played with popular expressions to produce wise cracks such as ‘Too many crooks spoil the swag’. Sadly, John could not apply the funniest comment – ‘Never look a sour grape in the mouth’ – to his final non-dealings with Lucian Freud. He returned the bitter sentiment and it damaged him.

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HULL AND BACK

In the summer of 1979 Colin Mantripp, a 22-year-old woodcarver, took off on a Triumph Bonneville motorbike in search of adventure. Riding through France, Italy and Greece without mishap, he had his number plate confiscated in Chania after an unfathomable parking offence. Directed from police station to post office to city hall, with a fine at each port of call, he wilted over a touristfleecing scam. A passer-by asked: ‘What’s wrong? You seem to have the weight of the world on your shoulders.’ The answer drew a Craxton belly laugh. He said they should bypass the law and make a new plate. So they did. ‘A piece of aluminium from here, nuts, bolts and washers there, holes drilled in the metal somewhere else’, said Colin. ‘Then back to his house-studio where I painted the letters in italic. Simple – and I loved the result. It had cost less than £1.’ Next they went to a restaurant where John made for the kitchen to find the best things for supper and help cook them. Then he returned with a question: had Colin noticed the stone the blacksmith had rested the metal on when drilling it? Yes, indeed. He had been riveted, so to speak, by the blackened but clearly carved block. John said it was an ancient altar. Colin, already enchanted, was to stay on for six life-changing months. His heterosexuality was tacitly, and gracefully, accepted. That night the visitor slept on the Moschon terrace overlooking the harbour – after a daring feat in getting there: The house was in a bit of a state, to say the least. The staircase from the kitchen was supported on a cantilevered wooden beam; it looked so rickety that many people refused to risk it. I was fit, young and carefree, but I walked close to the wall when I used it. He entered into the leisurely, companionable and bizarrely civilised ways of Moschon with gusto, his mentor paying for everything. Trying to share the Craxton appetite for life, he swallowed hard when John and fishermen friends chatted while pulling legs from small, live red crabs and sucking out flesh and juice. Given a bag of the delicacy as a parting present, he quickly emptied it into the sea. Other wariness brought lasting regret. John asked him to courier ‘important documents’ to a friend in the Peloponnese, but he feared some nefarious plot and lost the chance to meet Paddy Leigh Fermor. As it was, the Chania house needed his services. New sash windows were made, glazed and fitted. The dust of centuries had blown under the roof tiles and was slowly filtering through the studio

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Artist in studio window

ceiling to settle on wet pictures, so Colin renewed the wooden fixtures and cleaned out the loft space with the aid of a novel appliance for Chania – a vacuum cleaner gifted by Stanley Seeger. Soon Colin was a guest on the patron’s yacht, admiring handrails of narwhal tusks and, in the main salon, a 1920s replica of the throne from Tutankhamun’s tomb. When John and Stanley flew to America, Colin stayed behind – working on the house, carving a mirror frame and making a huge pile of leather boots as he tried to tidy up. All went magically well until the Mantripp motorbike was stolen. Determined to stay on until solving the crime, he joined a woodcarving workshop – making peacock panels for an altarpiece. Fellow carvers thought he was mad to be in Greece when the money and future were in West Germany. One morning the gentle rhythm of life was shattered by an explosion blowing in three of Moschon’s new windows – fishermen dynamiting for a stunning catch had set their gas-laden boat alight. He liked the madness where he was. After working on Moschon, Colin assisted Stanley – adding yacht repairs and flourishes, and frames for Picasso paintings (88 Seeger Picassos were to be sold in a 1993 New York sale). It launched a master-carved career catering to princes and pop stars. First, his initial patrons helped with the lost bike: John said the police would be energised by a reward of four bottles of whisky, which Stanley promised to provide. Posters were put up and word was put about. It then transpired that the Triumph had been taken by boy joyriders who were disturbed by some hunters, one hiding the bike in his shed. The holder agreed to an exchange with the owner for the whisky – but the same bribe was now due to the police. Colin, strapped for cash, stumped up two bottles of blended scotch; Stanley added a half-case of malt. John and Stanley were also rewarded. Colin heard them discussing a possible floor for the Seeger villa on Lanzarote based on an ancient design at Olympia. On his homeward ride he called at the ruins and sent back an architectural drawing of the coloured hexagonal stones and borders by way of a thank-you card. John adapted the plan in plain terracotta for his kitchen, unconcerned by any palaver for the fitter in cutting hexagons from squares.

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John was happy to be disturbed by a ringing doorbell: life always came first. And besides, even from the Ottoman overhang of the top-floor studio, the identity of any Moschon caller remained a mystery until the outside door was opened. Summoned from his easel one day in 1981, the artist came face to unknown face with a cadaverous Englishman bearing a bottle of Glenmorangie malt whisky and a box of Havana cigars. The gifts were appraised before the person; the stranger was invited in. The caller was the maverick art dealer Christopher Hull. A barrister’s son and nephew of the first Roman Catholic Cabinet minister since the Reformation, he was meant to follow family tradition in law and religion. Trained as a barrister, he never practised – a drinking habit calling him to the wrong sort of bar. He became a second-hand car salesman and a racing tipster before opening the Annex Galleries in an ex-teashop beside his house in Wimbledon. Neither did his faith survive his first marriage and ribald nature. He seemed to lack staying power. The fact that his favourite British artists were John Craxton and Michael Ayrton was only half in his favour when he rang the Moschon doorbell. Praise for John’s old enemy would have spurred an early exit. Christopher Hull and John Craxton proved a professional marriage made in an eccentrics’ heaven. Each admired the other’s chutzpah. John was impressed that Christopher had the gumption and gambler’s instinct to seek him out on Crete when no other dealer ever did. The Hull knack for selling pictures had already brought a bigger gallery in the Fulham Road. John had been off the London art map for nearly a decade, and here was a way of edging back with little fanfare or palaver. He entrusted his visitor with 37 fairly recent works, mostly small-scale drawings from his years in exile – pictures of Africa and the Canary Isles furthest from his Greek heart. The exhibition opening on 27 May 1982 was an unexpected success. The most major work – a painted Lanzarote landscape darkened by volcanic dust – stopped David Attenborough in his tracks when he saw it in the window. His name was added to a lengthy list of buyers. As a mark of Christopher Hull inventiveness, he grafted on to the Chelsea Flower Show one May a ‘Flower Pot Art’ display. Painted pots were offered by 58 artists, including Sandra Blow, Mary Fedden, Terry Frost and Julian Trevelyan. John began a prototype with a goat and foliage design, before completing a pot with cat, butterfly and fig leaves. The pot Cretan Cats Flower Pot, 1984 Tempera on terracotta, height 20.6 cm. Private collection

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was bought by Rhoda Pritzker, a Manchester-born, Chicago-based collector of British art, whose husband helped to run a family business empire including the Hyatt hotels. She and John became pen friends – with letters purportedly written by their pet cats. Both artist and dealer gained from a promising start. Christopher was emboldened to open his third and most illustrious gallery, in Belgravia’s Motcomb Street. He championed younger talents such as Sarah Raphael and Tessa Newcomb, but John Craxton was the asset on which he literally banked. Offhand with other artists, if not offensive, the abrasive dealer managed his main prize assiduously. John was provided with regular income for materials and freed from all administrative bother, so that pictures as yet unpainted – or at least incomplete – were effectively commissioned. Cash concerns had limited the artist’s spells in Greece to three or four months; now he could stay for ten months each year. On a family holiday in 1982, when she was 17, Tacita Dean met John by chance. He praised the ‘linear confidence’ in her street drawings and showed her his studio. It was full of pictures and smelled of paint. But best was his way of being: He was having fun and living doing what he loved. It was the first time I’d met a REAL artist, and suddenly I could see such a life was possible. I still carry around the dream that I might one day live my life in the way that I imagined then John Craxton was living his: peaceably making my work in a beautiful room with the light from the water outside reflecting on the ceiling – deadlines, budgets, emails and unremitting travel as yet unimagineable ingredients of my artistic life. It is good sometimes to remember these fantasies of the unattainable, in order to make some adjustments from time to time.1 In September 1982, Nicholas Moore, a zoology student turned painter, followed a lover to Crete, where they parted. He was introduced to John and seduced by him in the back of a car on the short journey from Chania to Souda. He was 24 and this was a fortnight before John’s 60th birthday. Nick said: ‘I came for breakfast and stayed nine years.’ John would be his companion, lover and mentor. For the big Craxton birthday they were guests of Stanley Seeger and Christopher Cone on the yacht Rosenkavalier. A Raoul Dufy oil hung over their bed. Later they received a guard of honour on the Royal Yacht Britannia – an episode inciting Craxtonian wit: the engine room was a dream it looked like it had been done by Cartier not a drop of oil anywhere if only the Royal apartments had got such umph & taste but alas they were pure Sunningdale minus the gladioli – expensive boredom reigns there & I had to flinch at the table lamp made from a chromium plated model sailboat! maybe it was a gift…2

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Early 1980s Chania saw a final fling before the end of carefree sex between men. As a meeting point for the fleets, and a destination for tourists in the know and mostly in the money, it was one of the world’s great homosexual cruising grounds. Warning signs stayed largely hidden. John’s South African acquaintance Tom Russell, a music and film critic, had been expelled from Crete in 1971. Back again in the late 1970s, one of his haunts was a town centre café run by ‘the queen of gay Chania’ and his mother. Even before there was a word for it, the ailing proprietor had shown him a black mark on his leg. ‘He got thinner and thinner and then died’, Tom said. ‘No one died of Aids, then or later, only of a virus.’ 3 In a rare admission, a gay bar called The Cuckoo’s Nest had a sign at the door saying: ‘No Aids Please’. Dorothy Andrews rented out her flat each summer, while she painted in her Cretan village house. One tenant, for two successive summers, was the American writer Edmund White, author of The Joy of Gay Sex and the memoir A Boy’s Own Story. He alienated Dorothy when she realised that the gay promiscuity chronicled in his short story An Oracle had actually occurred in her flat. Edmund said: ‘I had lots of guests, including my translator, who came with his lover. While there, they recognised that the lover had Aids and was going to die. His hands on the motor scooter turned purple.’4 Edmund tried to buy a house in Chania but was deterred by red tape. He almost drowned in an undertow on a nearby beach, and then work was calling him away. But he left with a friendly admiration for John Craxton: ‘He was always very welcoming in his cave-like house, and I liked him because he was an old-fashioned bohemian. He seemed much older than me, but he was still doing his work and picking up sailors.’ In Moschon Edmund met fellow American Cy Twombly, who had been transfixed by Europe since a first visit with his then lover, Robert Rauschenberg, and now lived in Italy with his Italian partner. Cy was deeply smitten with the history and culture of Greece, which fed into his singular art – a cross between painting, drawing and graffiti. Edmund said: Later I had a terrible falling out with Cy because I was supposed to have revealed the terrible sin that he was gay. I wrote a very noncommittal piece in Vanity Fair, but after that trip I told my biographer that I was fed up because he was so closeted and it was a sort of a clue in his art because he wrote words and then crossed them out. When that appeared in the biography, Cy and his boyfriend cursed me forever. That whole generation of very successful artists were closeted because that was the way to be rich and famous. If you came out your standing immediately plummeted. I think that one reason why John wasn’t more famous was that he came out. You could say that he didn’t do enough work, but if there had been a huge market clamouring for his work he might have done more. He is an important painter in the history of gay

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liberation. The paintings are unabashed and clearly gay though they were often bought by straight people. He seemed to be quite unabashedly gay – very virile at the same time. Most gay men of that generation were pretty nelly but he wasn’t at all. Even without the death knell of Aids, the homosexual playground was being closed by social revolution. This was almost the last moment in Greece when girls were supervised and young men, horny and stony broke, had to look elsewhere. As Edmund White put it: Nobody was gay but everybody was available. It’s a Mediterranean thing: it was still true in the 1940s in Jean Genet’s France; it was still true in Italy in the 1950s; and it was still true in Greece in the 1980s. It’s still true in the Arab world. The enemies of homosexuality are heterosexual dating, prosperity and the weakening of the Church, and all three things happened in Greece. Bruce Chatwin had a standing invitation to use the Moschon house on his ceaseless travels. Once, in London, John called on his friend and found him carefully seated and perfectly spotlit – leading man and director in his own drama. ‘He was a mad egomaniacal genius, a midwitch cuckoo’, John said. In 1985 the wanderer went to Chania to write his book The Songlines, a metaphor, via Aboriginal culture, for his restless existence. Predictably, he moved on – working close to Joan and Paddy as he fell ill. Bruce died from Aids in 1989, after a final flurry of books. The ashes of this Greek Orthodox convert went to a tiny Byzantine church above Kardamyli with some of the best and broadest views in Greece.

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PAINTING PLEASURE

One New Year in the early 1980s, John reported from Crete: Its been cold & stormy here before & around Christmas but now its halcyon weather & very beautifull over the V white, white mountains. everyone is out picking olives, I potter about in the kitchen making an odd paté & stuffing crepes with smoked ham and mushrooms, lentil soups – lots of garlic. plenty of fish in the market. No crabs, kippers, but there have been really delicious local prawns … Ive been working on a large painting for over a year determined to try & find a way of expressing a visual feeling, freshness & luminosity are part of what I want to say.1 The painting was Still Life with Three Sailors, evolving from 1980 to 1985. John had so many hopes for this picture of a taverna lunch that it now exists in two versions – the better-known image transformed again in between being photographed for a Christopher Hull catalogue and hanging in the exhibition. Christopher had a flat opposite his gallery, where John worked until the last minute. For this major canvas, Charles Findlay came in to model his booted feet. Much as John hated his art being analysed, he made an exception for Paddy Leigh Fermor in a catalogue essay. Paddy observed that Greek light – dazzling in onslaught, drastic in the contrast with flung shadows – renders everyday objects emblematic of themselves. So the still life in the painting coexists with the people on equal terms (and takes precedence in the title). This is borne out in smaller studies of table-top mezedes and each lunching sailor. A captured moment of ennui belies the notice on the background wall – ‘NO BREAKAGE BY ORDER’. The authorities sought in vain to end a taverna tradition of diners breaking crockery at the feet of the best dancers (each breaker paying his share of the damage). As Paddy’s note implies, a smashing party could still be nigh: The sailors are grouped in a flattened triangle and red wanders across the painting in a chevron picking up the stripes on their sleeves, the basket, the tomatoes sliced in the salad, the packet of cigarettes and the wine in the small tumblers, making optical puns in the same way as do the sailors’ caps with the plates. They only appear to be in whites, in reality they are sponging-up the colours of the table and the walls. The faintly absurd

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Still Life with Three Sailors, 1980–5 Tempera on canvas, 122 × 151 cm. Private collection

uniforms of these sailors have a dash of the Commedia dell’Arte and especially Watteau’s Grand Gilles; particularly so when one sees them wandering around Chania, not knowing where to go, 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 … The picture has the atmosphere of an enigma and such are sometimes best expressed, or hidden, in a plain statement.2 Paddy perceived the enigma in echoes of mystical suppers at Cana and Emmaus, Byzantine icons of three angels in the house of Abraham and the air evoked in earlier Craxton pictures as he grappled with the reality of Greece. ‘All I care about is what is called cross-pollination’, John informed Paddy in a background note.‘It is to me the greatest pleasure to witness its existence & especially, despite endless problems, painters & writers uprooting themselves, setting up shop all over the place, killing the sacred frontiers stone dead.’3 There is a playfulness around the sailors’ lunch: a signed cigarette packet and dated beer bottle; the location of Crete on a cap. In the art of John Craxton, the most serious statement may be best delivered in a joke.

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The pensive figure on the left was John’s lover of the time. An ex-sailor, Panos was now working on the endless restoration of the Moschon house when not posing for pictures. They went to secret places on John’s motorbike, Panos directing the way to a cove where they swam naked. Then the guide took a knife and cut limpets from the rocks to eat raw, Minoan fashion. John stayed with Panos in his home village where he already had many friends, but where the young man’s father became hostile on suspecting the nature of the relationship. John had hoped to provide Panos with a refuge when he bought a rather noble stone house in the village of Souri, near Vamos, with magnificent views from its first floor and terraces to the White Mountains. He also planned to paint there and to host visits from the Ghikas and Leigh Fermors. The house, built for a mid-nineteenth century Cretan, who made a fortune in America, had also featured in the 1980 Pantelis Voulgaris movie Eleftherios Venizelos 1910-1927, where the defeated statesman finally returns to his native roots and reflects on belief and belonging in the home of an old comrade-in-arms. Still Life with Three Sailors was previewed with other recent pictures at a crowded exhibition in Chania’s Chrysostomos Gallery, in January 1985, before moving to the British Council in Athens then to Christopher Hull Gallery in Belgravia. It hung in similarly stellar company – with companies of goats ablaze in flowers and tessellated light, and Aegean sun breaking the sides of ravines into planes of fractured colour and picking out foliage edges in a jewelled shimmer. A monumental pair of Voskos [Shepherd] paintings was inspired by the Minoan gold cup found in the royal tomb at Vaphio, Sparta, bearing scenes of wild bull capture. The Craxton figures wrestle with goats, whose horns are roped, but still the contest looks well matched – signifying the balance of living with nature that Greeks had achieved since pre-history and which remained the bedrock of a fast-developing and diversifying economy. The Cretan landscape still teemed with flocks and shepherds. Most strikingly, an elongated painting of a sleeping sailor was the antidote to all the lonely figures in the youthful art of John Craxton, closing eyes and minds to a world of woe. Reclining Figure with Asphodels I is a study in perfect contentment: a sailor takes a siesta in a Cretan meadow, arms outstretched and hands open in perfect peace. The portrait is also a life-affirming answer to the John Everett Millais painting of Ophelia, with raised arms and upward gaze, singing in a flower-laden river before drowning – a rejection of morbid Pre-Raphaelitism and the dead art of miserable England. In this image of apotheosis for John Craxton, the plants are as important as the person. Asphodels, blooming in a Cretan spring, garlanded Persephone when she returned from the underworld each year to bring an end to winter. English poetic tradition links them to the Elysian Fields but John knew the original mythology of the Asphodel Meadows. They were the part of the Ancient Greek underworld reserved for ordinary flawed humanity who, neither

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Voskos I, 1984 Tempera on canvas, 153 × 101 cm. John Craxton Estate

heroic nor wicked, were good and bad in parts: the company the artist loved to keep. Here was his idea of paradise. Popular in Greece, the exhibition was a big success in London, with most works sold on or before the opening day. David Attenborough urged his film-maker brother, Richard, to preview the show, and then was horrified when he bought Reclining Figure with Asphodels I. Although David acquired the best ravine and goat paintings, he rued missing what he saw as the finest picture. In the end the Craxton painting was bartered for two First World War prints by C.R.W. Nevinson – an act of devotion on David’s part, since, at the time, one print had a higher market value than the painting. With the Craxton Triumph Trophy out of action, Charles Findlay rode to the rescue on a Norton Commando. Driving John to the private view, Charlie was amazed when his passenger lost his nerve in Motcomb Street – having to be coaxed off the bike and into the gallery, where he staged an instant Craxton performance of bonhomie and swagger. Credit for that was short-lived. Charlie had recommended a garage to repair John’s bike, where it was stolen. Picture

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sales funded a new Moto Guzzi V35 that John vowed to ride to Greece. He would celebrate his 63rd birthday en route. On 12 September he rode to Harwich for the ferry to the Hook of Holland, and on to Amsterdam for the Stedelijk Museum and gay bars. He took the dull autobahn to duller Cologne, where he found a restorative Cretan restaurant while his new bike had mechanical attention. ‘This is certainly the Country of Ersatz’, he wrote in a diary. ‘Cheese, salami seem made of plastic. If I see another square window I’ll scream.’ Taking a night train to Munich, he admired Greek and Roman sculpture in the neoclassical Glyptothek museum, but then had to wheel his untrusty metal steed to another garage for more repairs. Now, at last, the real adventure began with a 400-mile ride to Venice, via Innsbruck and Vincenza. He wept on seeing Palladio’s ‘wonderfully physical’ Palazzo Chiericati – ‘it was like being moved by music’.4 He sent an apologetic note to John Piper, for failing to turn up for a planned visit after the theft of his Triumph. ‘Not having a motorbike made me feel like a centaur turning into a rocking horse’, he wrote. Although in Venice for only four hours, the city had looked ‘ravishing in the Canaletto afternoon sunlight’: I had never been there till the other day & now for the first time it was a v great experience. I could see how well you had trapped that almost fairytale magic, so oriental in feeling, that those amazing facades have. What genius in the landscaping of the buildings & waterways quite lost in a trance of wonderment and delight. Never was the problem of wealth & art so well resolved!5 He had planned to ride on to the southern ferry port of Brindisi but was terrified by close shaves with Italian lorries. Even Venice could not detain him given the chance of an early departure for Piraeus. With great relief he took his bike on to the next boat for Greece, looking forward to another taverna party.

Reclining Figure with Asphodels I, 1983–4 Tempera on canvas, 60 × 128 cm. Private collection

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John Craxton in his studio by René Groebli, 1983

Life was good for John Craxton in the 1980s. He wrote to his cousin Liz in the middle of his most Greek decade of being ‘up at the crack of midday etc but I do seem to get things done’. In fact each morning began with a struggle to get the BBC World Service on short-wave radio. Lapsang tea – from the Algerian Coffee Stores in Soho’s Old Compton Street – brewed while bread toasted on an asbestos pad on a gas ring. Health warnings went unheard, never mind unheeded. Drawing ran through the day and evening – filling notepads and sketchbooks, spilling over tickets, bills, envelopes, paper towels, furniture and walls. If not sketching a model, he worked from memory. A Conté pencil devotee also played with any wacky pen or marker and used Tippex for erasure and emphasis. For finished drawings, often highlighted in white gouache, he liked a grey fish wrapper. Tests in London confirmed high-quality acid-free paper fibres. The mainspring activity of drawing was broken by chores – a trip to the market or backstreet stores or workshops to have an obscure bit of metalwork cast for a drawer or a door that needed fixing. During this progress he would gather an entourage, since loath to tackle anything except art alone. A lengthy detour to a coffee-house might well ensue. Finally, he would go up to his studio to work on several canvases at the same time, some having been on the go for months or years. An audience would not be welcome, unless a model was needed. The landscapes were made from drawings in situ with added ideas from his head. Cotton duck canvas from Athens was primed with household white paint. While advocating the squaring-up system when transferring a preparatory

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Sunlit Ravine, 1982–5 Tempera on canvas, 130 × 60 cm. Private collection

drawing, John generally drew direct on the canvas, rubbing out until he got it right. He painted with a watered down PVA glue over the finished drawing to fix the lines, then wiped the canvas with a damp cloth to remove excess charcoal. This would then be left overnight for checking the next day. Having an aesthetic horror of tube acrylics, he painted with powdered pigment mixed with PVA glues and emulsion glaze bought in hardware stores or cadged from the Royal Opera House. The technique of his maturity was close to egg tempera. He used multiple brushes – from finest watercolourist tools to long-haired variants for sign-writing – and a palette knife. Nick Moore said: A lot of time was spent building up to work and proportionally less on

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the final canvas. He would endlessly change things to the point where one could never understand how he thought one version better than another. Underneath some of his best works from the 1980s there are at least five equally good versions. Then again he could never finish anything. In Venice we hunted out the tiniest authentic fittings for the Chania house when the place was falling to bits. Perhaps he was too gifted – like having such a large music collection that you can never decide which piece to play.6 Music usually played in the Chania studio, where there would be a break for tea in the late afternoon and then it would be back to work before a taverna evening with his sketchbook. Nick again: The dicier the taverna the better – best of all if full of sailors, where he would draw and flirt. Terrified at first, being no fan of the armed forces when in the UK, I was pleasantly surprised at how cool those guys were. What fascinated John Craxton was the process of evoking the life he loved, rather than the finished picture. He positively enjoyed the dissatisfaction, the ‘agonies of self-doubt’,7 while seeking to perfect his vision. He was gratified when the Tate bought three more of his paintings, and he rewarded the purchase of four drawings by his beloved British Museum with a gifted set of working proofs and lithographs for The Poet’s Eye. But, for all his sharpness of memory and the rising acclaim for his early pictures, he would never be a prisoner of his past. He was absolutely alive in each exquisite moment. In 1987, before the exhibition A Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, he wrote: ‘I dread the Barbican & dread the pigeon hole “Neo Romantic”. How lovely to be Douanier Rousseau for instance happy without a group leader’.8 However, curator David Mellor won him over and his copy of the catalogue was very lightly annotated. As well as 15 of his own works, John also lent Lucian’s Head of a Greek Man and insisted, weeks into the show, on additional security. He had received a tip-off that Lucian was asking gangland friends to steal it. A year later John was back to his tirades against the art world, on reading Malcolm Yorke’s The Spirit of Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and their Times. Many pages of his copy became more annotation than text, with lengthy points of fact and pithier asides such as ‘No, no, not true’, ‘All Wrong’ and ‘Balls’. His answer to so much critical raking over his artistic past was to mine ongoing inspirations from antiquity. One stand-out picture from the 1980s shows a boy with a stallion, watched by a girl from a window. Based on a headstone in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, The Blue Horse was bought by Stanley Seeger and Christopher Cone. It was the culmination of equine studies previously based on horses and riders on the Parthenon frieze in the British Museum. As ever, the painterly itinerary halted for visitors and visits. While delaying

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The Blue Horse, 1985 Tempera on canvas, 64 × 81 cm. Private collection

the completion of any picture, they reaffirmed the spirit of what John Craxton was trying to convey: ‘At the drop of a hat its nice to rush off on the byke to a mountain village nearby & drink raki & crack walnuts with the shepherds.’ 9 He had old friends in the village of Theriso, reached via the nearest of Crete’s 100 ravines. New friends were always being gathered further afield: Last Sunday we got up at 7am to go to the south of the island with a Greek friend to walk to one of the few villages where there is as yet no road its quite a slog but worth every ankle breaking step stunning landscape & masses of wild flowers banks of wild lupins & scarlet anemones as well as pink & white ones near the top & by the village of Agios Yannis two large bearded vultures wheeling overhead while distant herds of goats & sheep with the magic sound of their bells sounding almost like water. very handsome young shepherds loping along the paths stopping for a chat with us and asking us to stay.10 There was a happy visit from Geoffrey and Jane Grigson. Jane had been Geoffrey’s research assistant and it was a role each writer played for the other in their rewarding marriage, with shared passions for food, wild flowers and poetry. Since they spent part of each year in a Loire Valley cave house, without water, gas or electricity, the Grigsons were unfazed to encounter Moschon in

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Mezedes, 1983–4 Tempera on canvas, 41 × 61 cm. Private collection

an especially acute phase of unending restoration. After they left, John told them that the studio now had plaster, the kitchen hot water and ‘a set of green windswept acanthus Swansea plates about 1815 are a gift from England – as I use them every day they give my life a touch of gilded squalor’.11 Jane’s 1983 book The Observer Guide to European Cookery opens with a Greek chapter. John, contributing thoughts and tips over a series of meals, relished a recipe for a calf brains salad. His much-annotated copy of The Home Book of Greek Cookery, by Joyce M. Stubbs, now included his own tomato salad: very ripe tomatoes skinned and sliced with finely chopped onion, red wine vinegar, olive oil and sweet basil leaves. Oregano might replace the basil leaves, which were also delicious when added to stewed quinces. Jane sent John a copy of her Fish Cookery book, which he said would spur him into cooking in his revamped kitchen (‘the fin end of the wedge’). To accompany a swordfish steak he had ‘a new idea born of necessity: tomatoes, spring onions, lettuce, cucumber – salad with a dressing using tsatsiki as a base with extra oil & some wine vinegar’.12 The 1980s brought John and Myfanwy Piper and then, best of all, David Attenborough and his wife, Jane. Since Jane was an inspired cook, there was as much insightful talk in the Nicholas Moore in the Chania kitchen

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kitchen as the studio – and some challenging taverna meals. David said: One of my great pleasures in life was to be taken by John to his favourite harbourside restaurant in Chania and be given a dish of boiled sea creatures which even I, who am supposed to have some knowledge of the animal kingdom, found hard to identify.13 Further visitors were the Brutalist architect Denys Lasdun and his wife Susan. For all his modernism, Denys was a lover of fine architecture from any era. He had already based the main auditorium of his much-derided National Theatre on Epidaurus, and now he wanted to visit Minoan Phaistos for another décor idea. He loved Moschon, but Susan said: Talk about a tip! Thank God we didn’t actually eat or sleep there. I don’t know how Johnny could have lived there. And talk about green – he introduced us to this young guy called Richard as his nephew, and I just believed he was. He got so cross with me one day and said, ‘For goodness sake, Susan, he’s not my nephew.’ We had a hire car and could drive him around and he loved that. Wherever we went we would have a drink mid-morning and then a meal – he was a sort of hero to everyone. When we got to the main place, in the afternoon, word would get about and they packed up all their stuff in the fields and came to join us for a feast. The women hovered at the door.14 On 13 September 1989 Barbara Ghika died in London and John dropped everything to spend three months with the stricken Nico. That Christmas they stayed with Joan and Paddy at Kardamyli – the ideal place of balm for troubled spirits. While there, John learned that Lennox Berkeley had died on Boxing Day. His letter of condolence to Freda Berkeley proved why, for all his embarrassment over grammar and spelling, his correspondence was a delight and a solace for those he loved. Now he wrote, in what might have been a tribute to Barbara too: Has anyone written a book called ‘Great Wives of the World’ you will have a secure place in the section called ‘The wife as a muse’ for you have been midwife to so many memorable and ravishing musical works. If I believe in immortality at all, I certainly believe it exists in good measure in great works of art.15 For the next five years John gave increasing support to Nico as his closest art world friend grew more and more frail. In Athens he stayed often in Kriezotou Street – shopping, cooking, sorting studio issues and adding warmth and jollity that did much to lighten the darkening mood. Lolita, the housekeeper, adored him. As the Ghika eyesight dimmed John advised on plotting and colouring of pictures, including a last great rendition of the Kriezotou terrace. John was heavily involved in Nico’s final project, for a Ghika gallery in Kriezotou Street, before the whole property passed to the Benaki Museum on the artist’s death. He planned

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Terrace on Kriezotou Street by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, 1990 Oil on canvas, 150 × 150 cm. Benaki Museum / Ghika Gallery, Athens

Nico Ghika and John Craxton, Athens, 1990

exhibition spaces, chose paints and curtains and ensured that his friend’s wishes were enacted. He was already close to the Benaki’s veteran director, Angelos Delivorias; together with Nico they had enjoyed much convivial talk about art and architecture down the decades amid food, wine and laughter. Now they were often joined by the art historian Evita Arapoglou, Nico’s biographer. When Nico died, on 3 September 1994, John mourned a renaissance man who ‘animated whatever materials came into his beautiful hands’: Into his sometimes hidden geometries he poured his poetry of light and darkness, infusing colour into his forms with unmatched confidence, inventiveness, and authority. Always hand in hand with imagination, he let the spirit of poetry invade the labyrinthine city and moonlit walls. Here were landscapes radiant and full of joy as well as of enigma and mystery, so rare these days when so much art is paper-thin.16 He kept the memory of his friend alive – proving a crucial adviser to what would finally open as the Ghika Gallery in 2012, three years after his own death. Ioanna Providi, long-standing Benaki curator and first director of the Ghika house, depended on his help and came to love him dearly: John was a friend, a brother. He would say: ‘Ioanna, I’m broke. Can you lend me 500 drachmas?’ [enough for lunch]. I loved him for that. Lolita loved him as I did. She lent him money too. Of course he never repaid us; we never expected him to.17 344

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In 1990 the bohemian king of Chania became its British consular correspondent. If the offer of this official post was odd for so unorthodox a character, its acceptance was odder: his garrulous ways with the Greek language were far from diplomatic. His role was to assist British nationals in difficulty, maintain contact with the ex-pat community and provide information in an emergency. This lowest rung of the consular ladder gave neither diplomatic protection nor payment. Its latest occupant shunned most ex-pats as exported bores. At least clearance by the Greek authorities to hold the post should have squashed the rumours of espionage hounding John Craxton for so long. He may have got the job after being an amusing and informative presence on a visit by Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe – and, judging by warm letters of thanks, his hosting of subsequent tours by the Duke of Kent and other VIPs was enjoyed by all. John loved being piped on and off visiting Royal Navy vessels for officers’ receptions, though in between he would have preferred to be on a lower deck partying with the ratings. The annual May commemoration of the Battle of Crete was anyway a highlight of the Craxton year, especially after Paddy was able to return with the ending of the blood feud in 1975. Following Xan Fielding’s death, in 1991, John joined Magouche, Joan and Paddy to scatter the ashes in the White

John Craxton at home on Crete

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Mountains. He himself was an honorary partisan. He took visitors to the Commonwealth war cemetery at Souda and also to the German graves above Maleme whose caretakers were George Psychoundakis and Manolis Paterakis. Joking about not having to speak to the sleeping company, they were true to the Cretan code of honour. Antony Beevor was grateful to John for acting as interpreter during researches for his 1991 book The Battle of Crete, even though many lively conversations failed to be passed on as raki flowed. Unreliable in an emergency, since his painterly and private lives took precedence, the consular correspondent dutifully visited Britons in court and prison. He had form here: several Cretan friends were jailed for killing in family feuds. Fluent in Greek and the ways of the Aegean world, he could ease tense situations with a terrific or terrible joke. Defending two drunken sailors accused of unbuttoning their flies and exposing themselves in Herakleion, he pointed out that British naval issue trousers had zips. Any consular position carried a degree of risk given recurrent terrorist attacks. Kenneth Whitty, British Council director in Athens, had been shot dead in 1984. In April 1991 a parcel bomb in a Patras courier office close to the British consulate killed seven people. Even consular correspondents were assigned police protection until the authorities claimed a first success in breaking a terror cell and jailing pro-Palestinian plotters. Far-left 17 November group killers remained uncaught until after the death of British military attaché Brigadier Stephen Saunders in 2000. Unfortunately Cretan law enforcers were more zealous in pursuing Britain’s consular correspondent. John had befriended Maria Vassilaki, a young Byzantine art historian, working for the archaeology department in Chania. They shared a love of Cretan painted churches and El Greco, and also a sense of fun. For John’s birthday in 1995, Maria and her architect husband, Kostas Mavrakakis, arranged a tour party to nearby Aptera – an Ancient Greek and Roman town that John loved. They brought along an archaeologist friend as a guide, and the expert was enchanted by the impish and erudite John Craxton. Next day the archaeologist called Maria in shock and mortification, having been ordered to join a police search of the Craxton house for illegally held antiquities. Maria, leaving for Athens, phoned John to tell him to move at once to her house and register his things with the authorities. He thanked her profusely, promised to follow her instructions, and then returned to the distant planet of his painting. When the police called, a distracted artist let them in and opened another can of worms. As he reported: I was arrested the other day & had 15 minutes fame front page in the locals & television all libelous & untrue. I have absolutely nothing Greek (ie antiques) in the house except men and wine. I was held for 10 hours & had my fingerprints taken & mugshots etc. … I was a little annoyed at being called the British & Israeli consul. Im just hoping that the Islamic Jihad cant read Greek.1

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The maddest rumour spread about John Craxton branded him an imposter. The real Craxton had been originally in Crete but then, during that long absence, the artist was eliminated by Zionists and replaced by a Mossad agent. Such poison from the lunatic fringe dripped into the mainstream, while becoming another Craxton joke. Nick Moore had taken the comic element further – watching how a former golden boy of British art struggled to finish a picture, and thinking: ‘Well, I wonder…’ Now it was not so funny. John was held in a police cell overnight (enjoying the company). At the trial, Angelos Delivorias wrote in support and Kostas Mavrakakis appeared as a character witness – extolling the stature of a Greek-loving artist and decrying how his adopted town was treating him. The judge returned a not-guilty verdict. As a token of thanks, John gave Kostas a picture of a goat nibbling a fig tree overhanging a ravine. It was a self-portrait of the artist at his most reckless. The prosecution seemed to have a whiff of politics. John’s friend Konstantinos Mitsotakis, lately the Greek Prime Minister, had faced criticism over an antiquities collection he was donating to Chania. It was possible that opponents, re-empowered under George Papandreou, saw another weapon to use against him. In a sharply divided country, anything could be political. John held that the private collector worked for the public good in spotting and saving precious things that might otherwise be lost. Without gifts from private collections, the world’s museums would be emptied. Objects in question in his house had been brought in his luggage from London, and of course he had never troubled with certificates. Most fuss was over a carved male head from the Syrian city of Palmyra – one of the beautiful bust reliefs, linked to Greek art, sealing Roman era burial chambers. Reaching European markets and museums from the nineteenth century, these carvings escaped the mass destruction wrought by Islamist fanatics in 2015. The Craxton relic is now safe in the Benaki. In London until his death John kept four Gandharan schist heads, including some of the earliest-known depictions of Buddha. He had bought them cheaply during the iconoclasm of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Even before the monumental twin Bamiyan Buddha statues were blasted into rubble in 2001, he insisted that without a foreign market all stone images would have been smashed. John quit as a consular correspondent in protest at what he saw as a lack of official British support following his arrest. Tussles with the legal, diplomatic and political worlds were not the worst of it for John Craxton in the

Male bust from Palmyra, Syria, AD 193–235 Limestone, 23.5 × 18.5 × 22 cm. Benaki Museum of Greek Culture

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Craxton copy of Miró’s print Woman and Dog in Front of the Moon, 1990s Oil on card, 52 × 45 cm. John Craxton Estate

1990s. He had always operated an opendoor policy at Moschon – one reason for Nick’s departure was that he needed to live ‘in a place where I knew who had the keys’. There had been bearable thefts but finally, in 1994, trust was betrayed. A Ghika servant had been involved with a gang of art thieves, and John aided a prosecution. He believed that associates of convicted criminals had then exacted revenge. A visitor to Moschon drugged his drink and, while John was out cold, the house was stripped of major treasures – the Miró print Woman and Dog in Front of the Moon, cherished for 50 years, as well as works by Ghika, Sutherland and Tsarouchis. A Matisse cut-out gifted by Barbara Ghika was missed, along with every Craxton picture. Never losing a sense of humour, he claimed to have been not only robbed but insulted. A certain wariness now entered a nature that had always been blithely – or blindly – trusting. Perhaps in this he was only part of the times. Nobody in 1960s Chania locked their doors; in summer many seldom closed them. While livestock rustling was a Cretan sport, domestic burglary was almost unknown. John Craxton had never been one for proper precautions: he threw caution to the wind. Now he was more watchful, though few noticed as the party seemed to continue unchecked. He still looked set to burst with joy in everyday existence and delight in other people. The Miró and Sutherland were swiftly copied from memory. John’s friends would have paid the robber to take the composition now blocking his easel – and failing to resolve itself via several leaden versions and scores of unsatisfactory studies. Christopher Hull, homophobe at heart, had finally declared: ‘No more sailors!’ In truth, the canny businessman would have sold whatever his best-selling artist gave him. Also, the gay painter and film maker Derek Jarman, had long tried to make a Craxton film but had met with stout resistance. John told Richard Riley that he wanted to avoid a Jarmanesque fantasy sequence where he was surrounded by dreamy sailors. As Richard pointed out, such footage could have come from a documentary. Anyway, something snapped. For the first time in his career he painted an explicit comment on life. Soldier and Slivovitz refers to the 1992–5 Bosnian War, in which two million people from the former Yugoslavia were displaced, 100,000 killed and 20,000 women raped. A militiaman brandishes a rifle in one

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Soldier and Slivovitz, mid-1990s Tempera on canvas, 122 × 92.5 cm. John Craxton Estate

hand and an empty bottle in the other, while a woman flees weeping in the background. The slivovitz of the title – plum brandy distilled in Serb Orthodox monasteries – completes the heavy symbolism. For all the late twentiethcentury horrors in and around Bosnia Herzegovina, the Greek Civil War was worse and the Second World War without parallel – both of which John Craxton had appeared virtually not to notice while advancing his art. But he had been through the Blitz and roamed the conflicted Aegean; he needed experience to set off his imagination. Bosnia was unknown to him, so his creative response never rose above graphic illustration. Daily walks in Chania’s old town took in Kondilaki street and a surrounding maze of alleys and courtyards. This was the Jewish ghetto until May 1944.

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Residents had been rounded up for a death camp but the ship was torpedoed by a British submarine off Piraeus: everyone drowned. Concerned for a crumbling building that began as a Venetian church before seventeenthcentury conversion into the Etz Hayyim Synagogue, John was delighted when Nikos Stavroulakis led a rescue. The temple rededication was a focus for reconciliation and atonement. Stopping his old adversary in the street, John congratulated him on ‘a nice little sinecure’. The pun made for a good joke since Nikos did most of the work. Later, in the house of a mutual friend, the two men shared cannabis like a peace pipe. In a note for David Attenborough’s catalogue essay in the Christopher Hull survey John Craxton: Portraits 1942 –1992, the artist wrote: I don’t consider myself a portrait painter but I do enjoy the freedom most painters are given and that is the option to turn their hand to whatever chances are offered – ballet décor, designing furniture, buildings, ceramics, sculpture, portraits. These can be, and indeed are, some of the greatest and most profound works in Western art. On any scale they must have humanity or otherwise they look like effigies or waxworks. Drawing people is part of my life and I relish those times when I have a willing sitter, paper and a pencil close by. I suppose my own paintings are my self-portraits … I would love to have been an architect. That’s why my paintings have that lived-in look. In 1994 the National Portrait Gallery, having tried and failed to buy Lucian’s portrait of John on Poros, commissioned a likeness of Patrick Leigh Fermor. ‘The absolutely obvious person to paint the portrait was John Craxton’, recalled the then-director, Charles Saumarez Smith: I entered into correspondence with them both and John came to see me to discuss the project. At some point it became clear to me that it was never going to happen … They both liked gossip more than making time available for sittings.2 In June 2000 John drafted a schoolboy excuse from Crete: Thank you for your letter enquiring about Paddy Leigh Fermor’s portrait. Last year I spent a long weekend at Dumbleton with Paddy & Joan [their house in Gloucestershire]. Alas those days were hardly days at all a permanent crepuscule with pelting rain & low clouds made the conditions impossible. I did make some drawings of Paddy working as usual under pressure but they were only useful to me. I haven’t been able to get over to Kardamyli yet, but fully intend to. Do I get the impression that there is a deadline? 3

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Several weak drawings were destroyed after his death. He could neither conform to a high-profile public commission nor portray someone so dear to him. Down the decades he had declined to depict longer-term lovers, though at times sitters were effectively disguised – drafted into an artful drama hiding the relationship to the artist. The erotic charge hanging over every picture was more general and intangible. Paddy was never a lover but their intimacy defied depiction. By 1999 John had provided jackets for five of Paddy’s first editions plus paperbacks of The Traveller’s Tree and The Violins of Saint-Jacques. Paddy wrote to John Murray: ‘We must hang on to Johnny Craxton! His covers are so much part of the books that I almost feel that he wrote them and I drew the pictures.’4 Here was a sole thread of continuity. Christopher Hull closed his gallery in 1998, when rent doubled. John had expected the news for some time and, unlike Christopher, was not depressed. Willing to sell pictures privately, he was happier to buy them back. Elected a Royal Academician as late as 1993, John was proposed by Mary Fedden and Eduardo Paolozzi. Mary, who had rebutted the old charge that John was no longer really painting, was then embarrassed when he rarely submitted even one of six pictures permitted for each RA Summer Show. He told friends that his pictures never sold ‘and I hate hanging with all that supermarket art’.5 In truth, beyond indolence and diffidence, he felt awkward in the old citadel of artistic reaction even if times had changed. He liked the parties and the company of fellow academicians Adrian Berg, Sandra Blow, Jeffery Camp, David Hockney and Tom Phillips, but he and Anthony Green teamed up in vain to champion the ‘Hogarthian’ Beryl Cook. When they offered the humorist’s name for election, everyone laughed. So did Beryl when she heard about it. RA meetings were enlivened by the Craxton presence. When Phillip King was elected RA President, in 1999, the secretary went to make the traditional call to Buckingham Palace, leaving the assembled members waiting and waiting. Finally John’s voice rang out: The Queen has heard the message ‘Phillip King ma’am’. She has retorted: ‘No, he’s only the Duke of Edinburgh’ and slammed the phone down. Now she won’t pick it up again.

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The poet W.S. Graham, among the most serious of the drinkers John met in the talking pubs of wartime Soho, wrote in a posthumous address to his painter friend Peter Lanyon: The poet or painter steers his life to maim Himself somehow for the job.1 John seemed only to float in a current of pleasure as reflected in his pictures. But hedonism, always a sturdy attribute, acquires a heroic quality with age. Cousin Liz Waller noted: ‘All his life John tended to ignore the mundane: income tax and illness were not part of his plan.’2 As time and indulgence weathered him, he was forced to consult friends over the rising tide of physical ailments. For decades two of the gay adornments of medical and social London were the two Patricks: Trevor-Roper and Woodcock. Naturally John was close to both. Eye specialist Patrick Trevor-Roper was one of three establishment figures brave enough to out themselves in evidence to the Wolfenden Committee as it considered whether homosexual activity should remain a crime. The Terrence Higgins Trust, founded to counter the Aids crisis, began in his house. Bon viveur and world traveller, he intrigued John with theories of how eyesight conditions (myopia, astigmatism, glaucoma, cataract) had affected famous painters in their handling of colour, proportion and perspective. They appeared in a 1971 book, The World Through Blunted Sight. He continued to dispense wonderful advice and a cheerful view when his own vision was failing. John went by motorbike now and again to stay with Patrick Trevor-Roper at Long Crichel in Dorset, where he was the latest pillar of a male literary salon in which good food, fine talk and hilarity reigned. Patrick Woodcock was the doctor for everyone from visiting stage stars Martha Graham and Marlene Dietrich to painters Keith Vaughan, David Hockney and John Craxton. More concerned with the creative talents of his distinguished patients than their medical conditions, his most winning prescriptions were flattery and dinner parties. Hosting and cooking for mixed and single-sex gatherings, he healed the sick at heart by match-making. Pictures on his walls included the 1951 Craxton painting Boy with a Fever. In this doctor’s view the cure for the sad boy in bed was clear: he needed only to share it. After Patrick’s retirement to the south of France, John joined other

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artists and writers in drifting to the private surgery of Christian Carritt, who was also a Kensington hostess. The bane of her professional life was the novelist Rosamond Lehmann who required constant attention. John posed the opposite challenge. Always happy to have a friendly natter, he ignored most advice – self-medicating when unable to dismiss a problem entirely. The greatest terror of his life was dentistry. His teeth were the first part of him to give out, forcing him eventually to eschew meat since unable to chew it. He would never have adopted a vegetarian diet for health reasons, and his cooking continued to show a heart-stopping dedication to butter and cream. Never consciously abandoning his motorbikes, he just ceased to ride them one day when virtually an octogenarian. He always regretted giving up cigars and cigarettes, though deterred by a ‘death rattle’ in the chest. He continued to egg on Paddy Leigh Fermor in his 80-a-day habit and fully sympathised with his friend, who claimed that finally forsaking fags had killed his ability to finish a book. John detected a similar impact on his own art. Protected by a robust pleasure-seeking philosophy of life, he also had sturdy defences against emotional damage that belied the empathy of his pictures. While writing the best condolence letters, he believed that life was for the living and we should just get on with it. Other people’s emotional problems could be given short shrift. He saw a lot of the partly Chania-based Scottish painter Fionna Carlisle. Returning from a trip to China, during which her marriage had broken down, she touched on a sense of deep trauma while talking to John. He advised her to ‘try painting in a different room’.3 Basically he believed in the power of luck and in the imagination as ‘the ability to transpose oneself into something else’. As he said: My life has been a succession of happy accidents. People have luck every day and don’t realise it. Talent lies in recognising luck and knowing how to profit from it. Luck is the brother and sister of the imagination. If a fairy godmother, I would wish luck on a baby, but with trepidation, knowing that he or she is going to suffer. Luckily a friendship grew with the composer John Tavener, who had trained at the Royal Academy of Music, through a love of Byzantium and Greece. Heads turned when they got together – John Craxton the tall, battered, wild-haired

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Cretan chieftain; John Tavener, with a horse-like mane of blond hair, gaunter and taller due to the Marfan syndrome that, in a catalogue of ill-health, would eventually kill him. They shared a valiant hedonism and a Tavener concept of the erotic being part of everything applied to the painter and his pictures. John Tavener had a house on Evia but visited Crete, and the two artists dined with friends in London where they entertained the company with witty repartee as the composer exploited any available keyboard to improvise popular tunes in the style of Bach, Mozart and Strauss. Easter Sunday remained the highpoint on the Greek calendar and John usually spent it with Konstantinos and Marika Mitsotakis at the family house near Chania, eating lamb and drinking Cretan wine. He greatly admired their daughter, Dora, and mourned with them all when, in 1989, her husband Pavlos Bakoyannis, vocal opponent of the junta turned liberal politician, was murdered by Marxist terrorists. Just before he died, Konstantinos paid an affectionate tribute: Craxton’s time in Greece was not without its escapades … I can remember one or two times when he was robbed, but he loved Crete to the end and came as often as he could. When he fell ill, it began to be more difficult for him to come, but he always kept up contact with Marika; he would telephone, and we always welcomed him to Crete. We had a very close friendship with him.4 John’s gift to any social gathering was a wittily youthful spirit. Writing to James Lord, to praise his book about Picasso and Dora Maar, he said: Above all your re-creation of that incredibly lovely Dora … is masterly, a brilliant portrayal infinitely sad & touching – the only lady in Picasso’s life who had depth, intelligence & beauty but even Picasso couldnt escape from his Moorish Spanish makeup ie you keep young by having young lovers. It probably works, though I prefer Oscar’s remark that those whom the Gods love grow young.5 When Harold Craxton was appointed a Royal Academy professor, the principal had told him not to bother teaching the late Beethoven sonatas since ‘they were written by a sick and deaf old man’. John never forgot that dismissal of some of his favourite music. For a winning view into creative old age he liked to quote Pierre-Auguste Renoir when asked by a journalist how he made such sensuous pictures since his hands were crippled. ‘With my prick’, the painter replied. John remembered David Gascoyne as the image of poetic glamour, and in 1999 researcher Matthew Thomas set up a reunion in David’s house on the Isle of Wight. John got the taxi driver to stop at a pub for a nervesteadying brandy. In the event they picked up the easy talk of their youth.

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John Craxton and David Gascoyne

Since their last meeting in the 1940s, Gascoyne’s amphetamine addiction had obliterated his writing. He went mad in Paris and was returned to live with his parents. After their deaths he spent time in a psychiatric ward. Judy Lewis, reading poetry to the inmates, chose his poem ‘September Sun’. On learning that he had written it, she rescued him and married him. The poet enjoyed a late renaissance. His great poem ‘Ecce Homo’ ended with the hope that humanity’s long journey into night might not have been in vain. Judy added an upbeat coda to the surreal saga with a memoir called My Love Affair With Life.

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46 CHARMED LIFE

The picture obsessing John Craxton above all others in his final years – with variants sitting stubbornly on easels in Crete and London – was called Cat, Tree and Bird. This became his ultimate journey into the Cretan labyrinth; an exploration of abstracted, linear colour redolent of the heat, light and exhilaration of Greece. Also its danger. Even his closest friends feared that he had lost the thread. The scintillating picture subtitled The Blue Tree, a memorial to Julian Trevelyan, may now be seen as the natural conclusion to a creative journey where colours brighten into dazzling arrangements as landscapes become flattened and compressed like contoured maps. The complex composition sums up the haunting quality noted in late Craxton works by one perceptive reviewer, where ‘everything is held together by a linear organization that is part maze, part tree of life, part nervous system’.1 Too glaring for dim, grey Britain, it was a blueprint for a Mediterranean mosaic never to be made. In interviews John made light of his difficulties in capturing the essence of southerly life, and the feeling and meaning of his own sensuous existence, in paint: ‘I never think about colours. They alight there like birds … I don’t plan it out at all. The whole essence of art is a transformation, it’s making something practically out of nothing. Just out of earth pigment, you make a marvellous painting; it’s alchemy.2 Loving Greece as the land of metamorphosis, he played endlessly with ideas of cats turning into trees, goats petrifying into rocks and birds vanishing into thin air. The last exhibition of his lifetime, a 2001 show of drawings with Art First in London, included stark images of Dorset trees apparently dead from Dutch elm disease in the beloved landscape of his youth, where he had been revisiting his centenarian aunt Amy. In fact, the spindly trees were based on battered survivals – weakened by burrowing beetles but still living amid hedges where healthy sapling elms would ail only in maturity. The symbolism is subtle. But what a contrast with the fig and olive trees of Greece. The spreading woody and leafy growth shooting out of the Cat, Tree and Bird paintings like a volcanic eruption best recalls the renowned olive tree in the village of Ano Vouves near Chania, probably growing for 4,000 years and still bearing fruit. The twisted trunk of this Greek national monument looks like limestone.

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Cat, Tree and Bird (The Blue Tree), 1989–94 Tempera on canvas, 90 × 120.5 cm. Private collection

Its branches, woven into victors’ wreaths at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, were probably plucked by Minoans. John loved that sense of continuity. Male Cretans swear by the name of the Virgin; elsewhere in Greece only women do so. John believed that this harked back to the Minoan matriarchal society with a mother goddess, and ultimately to mother nature. Crete felt so close to primitive life thanks to the power of folk memory. ‘The Iron Age is not so long ago’, he said. ‘Take 20 grannies aged 88. Think of these grannies telling the old stories to their grandchildren.’ Guiding friends on meandering walking tours of Chania, en route to favourite restaurants, he would point out layers of built history and share that sense of moving backwards and forwards in time captured in his pictures. But he came to bemoan the old town preservation order that he had helped to instigate: The result of this dictatorship of taste is that an endless group of amateur and illiterate architecture students and soi-disant experts have slowly transformed the simple and dignified architecture of the Venetians … Houses that were plastered except for the stone windows now have a kitsch rustic look as stones have been uncovered and now lie … slowly eroding as they were never meant to be exposed.3

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He never ceased railing against ill-informed authority – hitting out at wrongful restoration and stepping with two large feet where angels feared to tread. A decade after his death, two workmen recalled his strict supervision of their repairs to a Venetian wall, still assuming the power of august officialdom in a passer-by who could not walk on. War was waged on blaring, late-night disco muzak (Melina Mercouri being successfully petitioned to silence one offender). Sketchbooks caricatured the glazed battalions of packaged tourists and all the mauling and mass catering they had unwittingly generated. He freely aired ‘wicked thoughts’ such as: ‘Never trust an Italian with your wallet, a Frenchman with your wife or a Greek with a bag of cement.’ Plates of filleted sardines would be rudely rejected for fish with their guts still in. He raged at how an aroma of jasmine had been uprooted for scentless, luridly pink bougainvillea that he called ‘bugger-upyour-villa’. Health and Safety was anathema; John argued for the liberty of accidents. Confrontation and collision continued. The tension in Cat, Tree and Bird flared into life. Cats ate any mice in the Craxton house, and their patron had periodic purges of the moths and silverfish ravaging clothes and paper. But geckoes never went hungry in Moschon: scorpions and cockroaches went unchecked in the basement. One night Richard Riley turned on the bedroom light to find a large scorpion on the wall above their heads. John counselled ignoring it and going back to sleep. In 2003 the painter paused from the huge work now endlessly in hand for a little gem called Cretan Cats – showing a pair of black mogs playing on a chair in the Chania kitchen. The model for both was a single tabby kitten. The picture prompted a tribute from fellow artist Jeffery Camp: Long ago I visited the London Gallery to see Surrealism and a unique show of Cubism. I was impressed by a large triangulated painting of a goat by John Craxton. He has been wise to live in Crete a lot and teach himself to paint calmly and well. A little influenced by Gris, Miró and William Roberts, home made with pigments, his fine acrylic surfaces are life enhancing, always surprising, a master maze and puzzle maker. John Craxton thinks brightly, paints with lines and sees warmly. The most recent I have seen is Cretan Cats, an eight-pawed classical composition, two cats one above the other allude to the six-sided tiles of the floor, the chair seat is wildly exciting. A boney fish perhaps decorates the cushion.4 Featured in the 2003 Royal Academy Summer Show, Cretan Cats became a memorial for Joan, who died in Greece that June. John also wrote a loving obituary (‘Like all adorable people Joan Leigh Fermor had something enigmatic about her nature which, together with her wonderful good looks, made her a very seductive presence.’5 ) She had been the most generous and loyal friend over six decades, and they shared a passion for the felines Paddy dismissed as ‘interior desecrators and downholsterers’.6 Joan could adopt dozens of cats at

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Cretan Cats, 2003 Tempera on canvas, 56 × 45.7 cm. John Craxton Estate (on long-term loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

a time. One late favourite, a rampant stray tom spraying around the house, was fondly named Johnny. Chaos became him, just as drama attended him. Cat, Tree and Bird was still in play when hijacked aeroplanes hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Summoned from his Kidderpore Avenue studio, the artist watched the New York horror unfolding on television. He was joined by John Adams, who had been rehearsing his Nixon in China opera in the music room and would soon write the choral work On the Transmigration of Souls as a 9/11 memorial. He relished the daily traffic of musicians to the Hampstead house, especially the Nash Ensemble, guitarist Julian Bream and saxophonist John Harle (the latter recording his composition Arcadia, inspired by the Craxton painting Pastoral for P.W., in 2013). If sounds downstairs displeased him, however, he pounded the floor with his Cretan stick.

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John had first designed greetings cards as a teenager for the family firm of C.W. Faulkner and his friends were grateful for a lifelong habit. Not that he could ever make a set date – once summing up his dilatory nature with the catch-all greeting: ‘As acting president of the Better Late Than Never Society, I am sending you this all purpose Xmas/New Year/birthday/Easter/summer equinox card…’. He produced very occasional landscape prints but from 1945 a festive card became an annual winter project, normally delivered by late spring. There were lithographs and linocuts, most hand-coloured – until the final years when photocopies received individual attention complete with a personalised and usually punning message to reflect what was very often a visual joke. Cats predominated – prowling and purring, toying with snails, flies and butterflies. Two mating or fighting felines might go head to head, while another predator went eye to eye with a goldfish. Letters continued to bear beastly illustrations, with puns ranging from ‘Mount Olympuss’ to ‘Cat-a-pillar’. For his 80th birthday party, a social animal whose life overflowed with friendship devised an invitation skitting on a lonely hearts’ column posting: ‘Wanted: octogenarian artist seeks friends and well-wishers to attend an at-home party.’ The accompanying image revisited a ‘Chrismouse’ card from 1971, depicting a mouse in a wine glass. The model had been borrowed from a Willesden pet shop. Celebrations for Frederick Ashton’s centenary, in 2004, involved a revival of Daphnis and Chloë as he had first conceived it 53 years earlier. The plan was followed by a discovery that the discarded Craxton décor had also been destroyed. All that remained were a few drawings and photos, a Decca album

Chrismouse Card, 1971/2002 Hand-coloured linocut, 22 × 18 cm. Private collection

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Daphnis and Chloë finale, Birmingham Royal Ballet, 2007

cover, two costumes bequeathed by Margot Fonteyn to the Covent Garden archive – and John Craxton’s impeccable memory. He moaned like mad on being asked to re-create his designs from scratch, with enormous exertions for an arthritic artist in his 82nd year, including the daily trek to a paint studio relocated to an East End industrial park. But of course he accepted. Now the décor would be more distinctive and comprehensive than at the 1951 premiere – side-tails for the first scene were fully realised, rather than remaining as plain blue blocks when time ran out; rocks in the middle scene were reddened as an added mark of menace; and Trinidad Sevillano wore the primrose yellow costume Margot had rejected. All the scarves were dyed on Crete under the artist’s strict supervision. Mike Becket, who had worked with John on Apollo and later revisions to Daphnis and Chloë, and had progressed to being both head scenic artist for the Royal Opera House and a long-standing Craxton friend, was now a trusted colleague. He knew the Gauloises shade of ultramarine the artist wanted for an Aegean sky, and how sequins and silver foil make a moonlit sea glitter. He appreciated the advantages of tempera over the oils favoured in 1951: Getting out of oils and into tempera did a lot more for his colours. They have a greater depth through washes. If you put the paint on thinly you can wash a darker colour over that. There are little facets that highlight, and you get a translucent quality.7 The Covent Garden curtain opened to reveal the designer’s Aegean paintings springing most movingly into Arcadian life. This festival of light and colour made for a fitting finale to the Craxton career. The Times enthused: ‘Daphnis and Chloë looks and sounds magnificent thanks to John Craxton’s restored 1951 designs and Ravel’s lush choral score.’ 8 The triumph had an encore via reworked décor for a Birmingham Royal Ballet tour, and a variety of stage sizes, in the autumn of 2007. The opening night at Sadler’s Wells in London was tarnished when John’s incessant comments from the stalls incensed a Greek woman seated in front of him. She kept turning

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round and telling him to shut up, but to no avail. After the final curtain, they rowed in blistering Greek as artistic director David Bintley and colleagues quietly retreated. By that point John was extremely ill – bearing cancer and other infirmities in stoic silence, even as pain made the muscles in his temples flinch. He remained, however battered, the image of youthful abandon, as his musical chum John Amis reported in The Oldie magazine: If it were not for an unsightly snaggle-tooth, John Craxton would seem to me more of an elderly schoolboy than an oldie … He is as much as I remember him in the Forties, when one evening after a concert and a drink or three, John and Lucian (as in Freud) climbed a lamp-post in Piccadilly. I stayed on terra firma anxiously on the qui vive for any rozzers wanting to have a word with us.9 John claimed that he wanted to travel more but was ‘too busy in London painting every day’. Always planning to return, he had just seen the last of Crete, as failing health kept him in London. Cash problems finally abated; he could sell pictures privately or swap them for specialist care. On Valentine’s Day 2006 he hailed the introduction of Artists’ Resale Right. Still, the financial fillip could render him furious when secondary sale receipts were more than he had been paid in the first place. There was a last collaboration of old chums in a 2008 volume of letters between Paddy and Debo Devonshire, edited by Charlotte Mosley and published by John Murray. At a Kidderpore Avenue tea party to discuss the idea the conversation drifted towards more agreeable gossip. There were waves of laughter of the kind soon to be enjoyed by readers (Debo: ‘Jack [Kennedy] asked what I do all day. Stumped.’ Paddy, after swimming the Hellespont in his 70th year: ‘I had beaten all records for slowness and length of immersion.’) The laughter stopped before publication when John’s jacket design was vetoed by Waterstone’s buyer, and mauled when he wanted it pulled. Fifty years of designing superb book covers for Paddy – a feat applauded by only one reviewer (Jan Morris) – ended in disgruntlement. For the RA Magazine of Spring 2007, Sarah Greenberg interviewed John over lunch at a restaurant of his choice – Bentley’s in Swallow Street, as it reminded him of Wheeler’s. ‘I adore oysters; you’re practically in the sea when you eat them’, he enthused. He was reported still to be living for most of the year in Crete. ‘The light in Greece is wonderful versus the grey duvet that blankets London’, he said. ‘In Crete one has the luxury of excluding light.’ In fact Greece, save for letters, phone calls and visitors, was now a memory. The party ran on in London. Richard Riley, having returned to Kidderpore Avenue from the north of England some years earlier, gradually became a full-time carer. The veteran friends and partners had a civil partnership in 2006. Reckoning the most wonderful sound in the world to be conversation over a shared meal – rating this even above the purring of a cat – a sybarite continued

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to wax lyrical on life and art around the Kidderpore Avenue kitchen table. Stiff vodka and tonics were dispensed at the start, with cider thereafter. Sunday lunch would be crab fetched by Richard from Brick Lane, and mayonnaise made to Margot’s mother’s recipe. As Tim Salmon noted: He would recall all sorts of dishes he had eaten, where and how they had been cooked. And was he fastidious! If you got the mayonnaise wrong or put the wrong sauce with the wrong fish or used the wrong kind of pan, you certainly got an earful! He loved Armagnac, but sadly could not drink it in his last days. When we brought him back a bottle – it had to come from the Gers – instead of drinking it he took the cork and dabbed it behind his ear like a drop of scent.10 Near the end he was being interviewed for this book and making notes for others with Maria Vassilaki on Cretan painted churches and El Greco. When Maria co-curated the Byzantium exhibition at the Royal Academy from October 2008, he devoured a six-month visual feast. Just as John had been merciless to any friend with a car on Crete, now he considered Maria a captive guide. Taking a folding-chair to the Piccadilly galleries, he insisted on early morning tutorials, hogging the best views of the best objects long after the public had been let in. He especially loved treasures from the Holy Monastery of St Catherine in Sinai – savouring the darkly comic twelfth-century Icon of the Heavenly Ladder of St John Klimakos, in which devils hook and shoot sinful souls from a skyward climb, even as exhibition visitors longed to do something similar to him. His last Christmas card, a farewell joke based on an icon of the Virgin Mary, showed the Mother of God saying into a mobile phone ‘I Am With Child’. It was the only one posted on time. Finally the Craxton party decamped to the Royal Free Hospital, in Hampstead, where he entertained the nurses. There were raucous gatherings at his bedside, during which the actress Anne Valery remarked: ‘We only die once dear, so make the most of it.’ Immaculate miniaturist drawings filled a small black notebook: Christmas Card, 2008 Hand-coloured print, 12.5 × 10.5 cm. Private collection

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liberated images of Greek birds rising above rocks and foliage, free at last from the Tippex white that had become his hesitant hallmark. One suggested a Cretan version of a Rembrandt etching, of three trees, disintegrating in the Moschon kitchen. He noted: My first visit to Crete held me in a state of marvel. How come those black booted, black kerchiefed men loaded with firearms, with wives equally dressed in black … could invent such ravishing rugs, blankets, sheets and towels? It was that daring pink and green, blue, yellow, black, bright red, green and mauve abstracted from flowers.

Early in the morning of 17 November 2009, still in a state of marvel, he died, aged 87. He stopped breathing almost exactly on the anniversary of a tank crashing into Athens Polytechnic in 1973, to crush student opposition to the junta and spark annual protests ever since. Hilary Spurling, whose Matisse biography he had so admired, summed up the stunned view of his friends: He was so alive that somehow it seemed he would rise above it, if anyone could, and next time we’d see him again roaring and stamping about as he used to do with his great stick and his majestic moustaches roaring up like a Homeric king. At least he went down as a king should.11 There were long newspaper obituaries and a Radio 4 tribute by (Elizabeth) Jane Howard, and David Attenborough, who said: ‘He was in love with the Mediterranean life with its light, its warmth and its food. And he was full of laughter. Full of laughter.’12 On 4 February 2010 David spoke again at a memorial service in St James’s Piccadilly, the artists’ church where William Blake was baptised. The Rev Lindsay Meader led the tribute to ‘John Craxton: Academician, Arcadian, connoisseur and biker.’ Repairers hammering on the church roof added their own percussive comment on art unfinished. Pianist Philip Gammon, Harold Craxton’s pupil, played Shostakovich – whose music had raised the dying, unselfpitying John Craxton to tears of joy.

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In the event of breathing his last in Greece, he had willed a wish to be buried in the churchyard at Souri below a panorama of the White Mountains. Most fittingly Richard threw a nomad’s ashes into the harbour at Chania, where they drew a shoal of the fishes he had loved to eat. Here was the all-consuming charm of life ongoing. Tacita Dean wrote: You can live a charmed life if you are charming, and Craxton was charming … He was tremendously important to me, which was most likely unbeknown to him. He showed me that to live the life of an artist was possible and even pleasurable. When a teenager she had snapped John stretching up to water a plant outside the back door of the Chania house: The photo is blurred and unremarkable but I have kept it all these years because it captured him in the way that inept pictures often reveal the most. He is seen from behind wearing nothing but an old pair of shorts, but in his posture and in the detail of that moment, you can see his exuberance and his pleasure in everything.13 Returning to Crete as a student, she had watched John draw a ‘perfect’ cat on kitchen paper and had been too awed to ask if she could keep it – a decision rued ever after. He had resisted her attempts to make a film about him. When she won the Hugo Boss Prize, in 2006, she bought a 1943 Tree Root in a Welsh Estuary drawing (p. 127). That stranded wartime image from a boy who only ever wanted to be in Greece, and who would realise his dream and not be disappointed, was of course a self-portrait. Greek gods are said to be jealous of human happiness, and so conspire to foil it, but John Craxton enjoyed a life of gifts. His achievement was to master the art of ebullience, and surpassing bliss lights up his pictures.

John Craxton by Tacita Dean, 1982

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EPILOGUE

Early in 2000 I attended Prunella Clough’s memorial service in St James’s Piccadilly. A regular supper guest at her house for years, with the same one or two others, I might have thought this artist practically a hermit, but the Annely Juda gallery wake was crammed – and I was pressed against a figure of legend: John Craxton. Unheard of for some time, so that I had even wondered if he might be dead, there was no mistaking the image of a Cretan elder complete with woven rucksack and shepherd’s stick. We took a taxi to Soho – to the French pub, where John said he had drunk in 1941. Looking around the bar, he added: ‘I can’t see anyone from those days.’ A mere 59 years later, there was clearly a lack of staying power in other hedonists. The speaker was the most vivid man I ever met. No one enjoyed the sensations and intoxications of life more than he did. Basically profound, and with an astounding structure of recondite knowledge, he was forever building up to the next joke. By the end of that story-filled evening I begged to write his biography, only to be rebuffed like everyone else who had asked since Geoffrey Grigson’s book of 1948. John said that art writers lorded it over their subjects, worked against a din of grinding axes and got facts wrong; he wanted to pen a study on bad painters turned bitter critics, to be called ‘Manqué Business’. Despite that injunction, I wrote down all I could remember from our first meeting on the journey home. We met a lot, and I became John’s secretary – rendering his many letters into everyday English and excising insults. Each time he phoned, I made notes of my own. Over many meals in the Kidderpore Avenue kitchen, he may have suspected dysentery since I was so often in the lavatory – scribbling like crazy. Going with John Craxton to an exhibition was a terrific treat. On the 200th anniversary of Samuel Palmer’s birth we went to the British Museum show, and then to the Konaki restaurant on Coptic Street. After a typical tour de force of esoteric erudition, John donned the guise of a blimpish clot. He asked the aged Greek waiter to explain everything on the menu since he was unused to foreign food. ‘What is this massacre?’ he demanded, drumming a finger on the word moussaka. Eventually we made our choices and when the server was half-way to the kitchen, John let fly with a tirade of demotic Greek – telling me the filthiest story he could imagine. The waiter stopped – shoulders sagged, knees buckled – before slowly walking on. Later he whispered: ‘Your friend knows Greek words my mother never heard.’ It amazed me that a figure of such stature was hell bent on entertaining. He enjoyed himself by sharing enjoyment – a key point in his gifts as a painter.

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John Craxton by Matthew Thomas, 1997

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For all the bluster there was a sense of courtly consideration in a man forever striking up conversations on the bus. Always pro-life, he was deeply interested in and sympathetic to other people. Then again, he could cause excruciating embarrassment. In his last decade he was about done with exhibitions, but I felt he might relent for a retrospective at lovely Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath. Our reconnaissance trip followed a rehang in which major artworks had been diminished to fit an interior design. Shaking his stick at a uniformed guard, a wildman roared: ‘Are you responsible for this fucking disgrace?’ I gave him art books to which he added witty and barbed wisdom, and then he demanded a copy of a volume I had written, which he had seen reviewed. He promised to read, mark and return it – a tutor correcting homework. After months of silence he said we could do a book together on his terms. Although fobbing off art inquiries by claiming a faulty memory, in our taped interviews from 2006 he recollected with crystal clarity. What he said often ran counter to received opinion, but fact checks almost invariably bore him out. While we were working on the monograph, he said: ‘I know you’ll write a second volume, once I’m out of the way.’ Then he assisted this biography. I found him a doctor (‘She’s marvellous – half Peter Pan and half Captain Hook!’) whom he saw as ‘a friend looking in’. When he delivered fond words to me on the phone one morning, that sounded like a parting shot, I called the doctor friend who promptly committed him to hospital. A duodenal ulcer was prevented from bursting – at an age when the same complaint had killed Harold Craxton. By the time I got to the private room, the impatient was wired up and feeling stronger. He said: ‘I know you are only doing this so I am still around to help with your book.’ The specialist arrived and asked: ‘What are your priorities for the rest of your life?’ – a clever way of working out how much intervention would be required. John said: ‘It’s essential that I out-live Lucian Freud.’ The question came from an informed art lover being paid with a picture. ‘Who is Lucian Freud?’ the medic asked, making John feel better. He lived on for more than a year. The monograph we had planned for John’s 90th birthday was published in May 2011, 18 months after his death. Paddy lived just long enough to enjoy it. Lucian lived long enough to enjoy excoriating it.1 Knowing that John was an absolute stickler for the truth as he saw it, I feared being felled by a thunderbolt because of some error in his published story. I survived a Tate party and the launch of a small show, followed by Christie’s and Heywood Hill bookshop receptions. Then, on 26 May, a friend hosted a celebratory supper at The Wolseley on Piccadilly. We had often eaten there before, with Lucian an evening fixture at a corner table in the restaurant’s exclusive central section, usually with his model of the moment. Occasionally he fixed me with an X-ray gaze, but we never spoke. Now I felt safe enough to raise a glass of champagne. While doing so, I saw the corner table oddly empty:

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View from the Craxton studio terrace, Chania

Lucian Freud was prostrated on a nearby bench, holding an icepack to his forehead. I wondered whether the thunderbolt had got him, but he had fallen on the pavement. Six weeks later, back in The Wolseley, we found a candle burning on the corner table where no one was allowed to sit. Lucian had died that day. Since 2013 there has been a string of memorial shows for John Craxton – at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Dorset County Museum, Salisbury Museum and Osborne Samuel gallery in London. The exhibition Charmed Lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor was seen by 100,000 people at the A.G. Leventis Gallery in Nicosia, the Benaki Museum in Athens and the British Museum. In April 2022 the Benaki launched a centenary touring show that drew a record audience. Richard Riley and I are co-trustees of the John Craxton Estate, and our future projects include a catalogue raisonné. The Chania house has been beautifully and faithfully restored by my partner, Joachim Jacobs; watched, until 2017, by the star of the Cretan Cats painting. Entering the world of John Craxton has been a journey into joy. I now love Greece as he did. Magouche Fielding, Christopher Mason and many other friends of John became friends of mine. Sonia ‘Spider’ Quennell – the girl who paused for a portrait (p. 135) on a lifelong flight from boredom – was last seen in a dementia unit. Surrounded by nurses, she said she was happy to put up ‘all these nice girls’ in her flat but imagined that at some point they would have jobs to go to. Then she asked if I was married. ‘No’, I lied. ‘I’ll take you on if no one else will.’ ‘Spider!’ I said. ‘You hated being married.’ ‘I know I did darling. But this could be your last chance.’

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SOURCES CHAPTER 1: SETTING OFF

1 Elizabeth Jane Howard, Slipstream: A Memoir, Macmillan, 2002, pp. 53 –4. CHAPTER 2: OPEN HOUSE

1 2 3 4

Author interview James Rubens. Author interview James Rubens. Author interview Helen Ireland. Denis Matthews, In Pursuit of Music, Victor Gollancz, 1966, pp. 37–8. 5 Ibid. 6 Elizabeth Jane Howard, Slipstream: A Memoir, Macmillan, 2002, p. 52. CHAPTER 3: WOOD OF ST JOHN

1 Frances Partridge, Memories, Victor Gollancz, 1981, pp. 154– 5. CHAPTER 4: HAROLD AND ESSIE

1 Unpublished memoir, Craxton archive. 2 Ibid. CHAPTER 5: NOMAD CHILD

1 Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Still Digging: Adventures in Archaeology, Pan, 1958, p. 75. 2 Jacquetta Hawkes, Mortimer Wheeler: Adventurer in Archaeology, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982, p. 157. 3 Catalogue note for John Craxton exhibition, Pallant House, Chichester, 1998. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

CHAPTER 11: DREAMER IN LANDSCAPE

1 Interview with Bryan Robertson for the exhibition catalogue John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings 1941– 1966, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1967. CHAPTER 12: JOHN AND LUCIAN

1 2 3 4

Author interview Esther Freud. Author interview. Author interview. Interview by Matthew Thomas.

CHAPTER 13: BROTHERS IN ARTS

1 David Fraser Jenkins and Hugh Fowler-Wright, The Art of John Piper, Unicorn Press, 2016, p. 203. 2 Tate archive. 3 William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922–1968, Bloomsbury, 2019, p. 159. 4 Postcard to Felicity Hellaby, sold Christie’s, London, 22 January 2020. 5 Author interview Miranda Rothschild. 6 Cressida Connolly, The Rare and the Beautiful: The Lives of the Garmans, Fourth Estate, 2004, p. 174. 7 Tate archive. CHAPTER 14: EXQUISITE CORPSES

1 Author interview. 2 Ruthven Todd, Fitzrovia and the Road to York Minister, Michael Parkin Fine Art, 1973. 3 Undated letter to E.Q. Nicholson, Tate archive. 4 Ibid.

CHAPTER 7: WILD DORSET

1 Catalogue note for Undiscovered Country: CHAPTER 15: WELSH ARCADIA A Touring Exhibition of Paintings and Photographs 1 Roger Berthoud, Graham Sutherland: of Dorset, Christie’s, 1995. A Biography, Faber, 1982, p. 110. 2 Interview with Bryan Robertson for the CHAPTER 8: BEAUTIFUL VISITS exhibition catalogue John Craxton: Paintings 1 Elizabeth Jane Howard, Slipstream: A Memoir, and Drawings 1941–1966, Macmillan, 2002, p. 53. Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1967. 3 Denton Welch, A Voice Through a Cloud, CHAPTER 9: A PRIVATE WAR John Lehmann, 1950, pp. 115 –16. 1 Michael Holroyd, Augustus John: The New Biography, Chatto & Windus, 1996, p. 382. CHAPTER 16: THE POET’S EYE 1 Tate archive. CHAPTER 10: BANG IN THE BLITZ 2 Oliver Soden, Michael Tippett: 1 Frances Partridge, A Pacifist’s War, The Hogarth The Biography, Orion, 2019, p. 303. Press, 1978, pp. 66 – 7. 3 Interview by Anne Campbell Dixon, 2 E.Q. Nicholson funeral address, September 1992. The Times, 22 October 1998. 3 E.Q. Nicholson: Designer and Painter, The Cygnet 4 Letter 22 January 1944, Craxton archive. Press, 1990. 5 Ibid. 4 Catalogue note for The Nicholsons: A Story of 6 Masterpieces: Art and East Anglia exhibition Four People and their Designs, York City Art catalogue, edited by Ian Collins, Sainsbury Gallery, 1988. Centre, Norwich, 2013, p. 228. 5 Suzanne Bosman, The National Gallery in Wartime, National Gallery Company London, 2008, p. 40.

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CHAPTER 17: LESS THAN LIBERATION

1 Tate archive. 2 Pallant House Gallery magazine interview for Poets in the Landscape: The Romantic Spirit in British Art exhibition, Pallant House, Chichester, 2007. 3 Tate archive. 4 Craxton archive.

CHAPTER 23: RAVISHER OF EYES

1 2 3 4

The Anglo-Hellenic Review, autumn 1992. Ibid. Ibid. Xan Fielding, The Stronghold: Four Seasons in the White Mountains of Crete, Secker & Warburg, 1953, p. 120.

CHAPTER 24: ON A TIGHTROPE CHAPTER 18: THE GREAT ESCAPE

1 2 3 4 5 6

Tate archive. Tate archive. Author interview. The Independent, 7 September 1994. Undated letter, Freud archive. Letter to Harold and Essie, 20 May 1946.

CHAPTER 19: SPRING IN ATHENS

1 Edmund Wilson, Europe Without Baedeker: Sketches Among the Ruins of Italy, Greece and England, Secker & Warburg, 1948, p. 161. 2 Undated letter, Tate archive. 3 Roderick Beaton, George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel – A Biography, Yale University Press, 2003, pp. 269– 70. 4 Norton archive. CHAPTER 20: RITES OF PASSAGE

1 Lawrence Durrell, The Greek Islands, Faber, 1978, p. 294. 2 Note for David Attenborough’s catalogue essay, John Craxton: Portraits 1942 – 1992, Christopher Hull Gallery, London, 1993. CHAPTER 21: LUCIAN AGAIN

1 2 3 4

Undated letter, Tate archive. Start the Week, BBC Radio 4, 15 April 2019. Interview by Matthew Thomas. John Fowles, introduction to The Magus, Jonathan Cape, 1977, pp. 8 – 9. 5 George Seferis: A Poet’s Journal, Days of 1945 –1951, Harvard University Press, 1974, p. 49. 6 Author interview. 7 George Millar, Isabel and the Sea, William Heinemann, 1949, p. 356. CHAPTER 22: VOYAGES OF DISCOVERY

1 George Millar, Isabel and the Sea, William Heinemann, 1949, p. 381. 2 Letter from Lucian Freud, January 1947, John Craxton archive. 3 William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Youth 1922–1968, Bloomsbury, 2019, p. 146. 4 Undated letter, Tate archive. 5 Lawrence Durrell, Prospero’s Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu, Faber & Faber, 1945, p. 11. 6 Postcard to Felicity Hellaby, sold Christie’s, London, 22 January 2020. 7 Draft of letter to New Statesman, December 2000. 8 31 December 2000. 9 Undated letter, Tate archive.

1 Card from Lucian Freud, posted in France 15 October 1947, John Craxton archive. 2 Michael McNay, John Richardson obituary, The Guardian, 12 March 2019. 3 George Melly, Don’t Tell Sybil: An Intimate Memoir of E.L.T. Mesens, William Heinemann, 1997, p. 90. 4 Ibid., p. 104. 5 New Statesman, 11 March 2002. 6 Letter to Anthony d’Offay, 14 December 1978, rejecting a purchase offer. 7 Undated letter, Tate archive. 8 Geoffrey Grigson, ‘John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings’, Horizon, 1948. 9 Unpublished memoir, Pallant House archive. 10 The Anglo-Hellenic Review, spring 1993. 11 Letter to Tate, March 1984. 12 Tate archive. CHAPTER 25: GOING NATIVE

1 Geoffrey Grigson, ‘John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings’, Horizon, 1948. 2 Reg Butler, At Large in the Sun, Herbert Jenkins, 1953, p. 171. 3 The Listener, 14 July 1949. CHAPTER 26: DAPHNIS AND CHLOË

1 Letter from Peter Watson, December 1950, Craxton archive. 2 Letter from Peter Watson, 17 May 1949, Craxton archive. 3 Myfanwy Piper, festival book note on the exhibition Peter Pears: The Collector, Aldeburgh Festival, 1987. 4 Meredith Daneman, Margot Fonteyn, Viking, 2004, p. 266. 5 Ibid. 6 Author interview. 7 Author interview. CHAPTER 27: AEGEAN ADVENTURE

1 Julie Kavanagh, Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton, Pantheon, 1996, p. 367. 2 Patrick Leigh Fermor, ‘Remote Archipelago’, 1951, National Library of Scotland. 3 Meredith Daneman, Margot Fonteyn, Viking, 2004, p. 265. 4 Ibid., pp. 270 – 1. 5 Ibid., p. 272.

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CHAPTER 28: BLOODY BLIGHTY

1 Quentin Stevenson, letter to author. 2 Mary Renault, The Charioteer, Longmans, Green & Co., 1953, p. 153. 3  Vogue, November 1951, p. 165. 4 Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life, Bloomsbury, 2005, p. 338. 5 Ibid. 6 Xan Fielding, Hide and Seek: The Story of a War-time Agent, Secker & Warburg, 1954, p. 5.

CHAPTER 29: I SPY TROUBLE

1 D.J. Taylor, Lost Girls, Constable, 2019, p. 36. 2 Conversation with Gerard Hastings in catalogue for John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings 1980 –85, Christopher Hull Gallery, London, 1985, p. 22. 3 Plausible Portraits of James Lord with Commentary by the Model, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, p. 74. 4 John Murphy, unpublished memoir.

CHAPTER 30: THE SEA CHANGE

1 Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Sea Change, Jonathan Cape (1959), 1986 edition, p. 247. 2 Ghika: The Artist’s Studios, Benaki Museum, 1999, p. 62. 3 Ibid., p. 65. 4 ‘Reflections on Hydra’ in An Investigation of Nationality, translated by John Leatham, Efthini, 1985, p. 17. 5 Letter of 10 May 1960, Leigh Fermor archive, National Library of Scotland. 6 Ibid. 7 Charmian Clift, Peel Me a Lotus, Hutchinson (1959), 1989 edition, p. 106. 8 Author interview Mary Gifford Brown.

CHAPTER 31: LOTUS EATING

1 Undated letter, Leigh Fermor archive, National Library of Scotland. 2 Undated letters, Craxton archive. 3 Dear Mr Murray: Letters to a Gentleman Publisher, edited by David McClay, John Murray, 2018, p. 266. 4 Isabel Lambert unpublished memoir, Tate archive. 5 Email to author. 6 Country Life, 22 January 2020.

CHAPTER 32: NEW MUSE

1 Jeremy Hutchinson, interview by Evita Arapoglou, Ian Collins and Ioanna Moraiti for Charmed Lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor catalogue, Leventis, 2017. 2  Ghika: The Artist’s Studios, Benaki Museum, 1999, p. 65. 3 Undated letter, Craxton archive. 4 Reynolds Price, Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back, Scribner, 2009, pp. 208 – 9. 5 The Financial Times, 23 March 2012. 6 Author interview.

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7  Kathimerini weekly supplement, 15 January 1995. 8 Charmian Clift, Peel Me a Lotus, Hutchinson (1959), 1989 edition, p. 137. CHAPTER 33: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

1 Interview for Madonna Benjamin documentary on Margot Fonteyn, for Secret Lives series, Channel Four, 1997. 2 Winston Churchill, Painting as a Pastime, Odhams Press and Ernest Benn, 1948, p. 16. 3 David Coombs and Minnie Churchill, Sir Winston Churchill: His Life and His Paintings, Ware House Publishing, 2011, p. 86. 4 Author interview. 5 Interview by Anne Campbell Dixon, The Times, 22 October 1998. 6 Leigh Fermor archive, National Library of Scotland.

CHAPTER 34: ARRESTING TIMES

1 Letter to author. 2  J ohn Donat: Crete 1960, edited by Maria Vassilaki, Crete University Press, 1999, p. 34. 3 Ibid., p. 141. 4 Osbert Lancaster, Sailing to Byzantium: An Archaeological Companion, John Murray, 1969, p. 141. 5 RA Magazine, spring 1998. 6 Ibid. 7 Artemis Cooper, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, John Murray, p. 317.

CHAPTER 35: PHOENIX NESTS

1 Catalogue for Whitechapel Art Gallery show John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings, 1941– 1966, 1967, p. 10. 2 Martin Gayford, Modern Painters, autumn 1992, p. 65. 3 Christopher Mason, unpublished memoir. 4 Undated letter, Benaki Museum, Athens. 5 Ibid.  hika: The Artist’s Studios, Benaki Museum, 6  G 1999, p. 66. 7 Undated letter, Benaki Museum, Athens. 8 Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell, Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra 1955 –1964, Monash University Publishing, 2018, p. 114. 9 Interview for Nick Broomfield documentary Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love, 2019. 10 Undated letter, Leigh Fermor archive, National Library of Scotland. 11 Tate archive.

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CHAPTER 36: PORTENT OF TRAGEDY

1 Tim Salmon, The Anglo-Hellenic Review, spring 2010. 2 Email to author. 3 Author interview Mary Gifford Brown. 4 The Colour of Silence: The Artist Betty Ryan and Andros, Kaireios Library/Goulandris Foundation, 2014, p. 28. 5 Tim Salmon, ‘That Summer’, The Independent, 23 July 1994. 6 Charles Haldeman, American Vogue, 15 January 1965. 7 Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin, selected and edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare, Jonathan Cape, 2010, pp. 52 –3. 8 Betty Ryan Recalls and Reflects, edited by Sonny Saul, Pleasant Street Books, 2013, p. 30.

CHAPTER 40: A TIME OF GIFTS

1 Undated letter to Christopher Mason and Joanna Carrington. CHAPTER 41: THE LAST OF LUCIAN

1 William Feaver, The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame, Bloomsbury, 2020, p. 173. 2 Draft letter, Craxton archive. 3 Tatler, June 2002. 4 Author interview. 5 Author interview. 6 Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, Thames & Hudson, 2005, p. 34. 7 Author interview. 8 Tom Stacey, letter to The Spectator, 19 October 2013. CHAPTER 42: HULL AND BACK

CHAPTER 37: ECLIPSE OF APOLLO

1 Letter of August 1966, Leigh Fermor archive, National Library of Scotland. 2 London Evening Standard, 15 October 1966. 3 Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber: The Composer and his Music, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 451. 4 Catalogue for John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings, 1941–1966, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1967, p. 5. 5 Catalogue for 45– 99: A Personal View of British Painting and Sculpture. Critic’s Choice: A Selection by Bryan Robertson, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 1999. 6 Undated letter, Leigh Fermor archive, National Library of Scotland. CHAPTER 38: INTO THE RAVINE

1 Author interview. 2 Undated letter, Leigh Fermor archive, National Library of Scotland. 3 Interview by Matthew Thomas. 4 The Letters of Ann Fleming, edited by Mark Amory, Collins Harvill, 1985, p. 45. 5 The Animals: Love Letters between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, edited by Katherine Bucknell, Vintage, 2014, p. 323. 6 Ibid., p. 352. 7 Letter to Freda Berkeley, December 1989, Britten Pears Arts, Aldeburgh. 8 Seferis archive, Gennadius Library, Athens. 9 Benaki Museum, Athens. 10 Author interview. 11 Patrick Proctor: Self-Portrait, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991, p. 175. 12 Author interview. CHAPTER 39: ATHENS OF THE NORTH

1 Accession note, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, October 1985. 2 Email to author. 3 Email to author. 4 Email to author.

1 2 3 4

The Independent on Sunday, 21 November 1994. Letter to Elizabeth Waller, 25 April 1986. Author interview. Author interview.

CHAPTER 43: PAINTING PLEASURE

1 Undated letter to Christopher Mason and Joanna Carrington. 2 Catalogue for John Craxton: An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings 1980 – 1985, Christopher Hull Gallery, 1985, p. 3. 3 Draft of undated letter to Paddy Leigh Fermor, Craxton archive. 4 Draft of letter to Douglas Hall, 8 December 1985, Craxton archive. 5 Letter to John Piper, 26 July 1985, Tate archive. 6 Author interview. 7 Interview by Andrew Lambirth for National Life Stories: Artists’ Lives, British Library, 1999 –2001. 8 Draft of letter to Roger Bristow, April 1987, Craxton archive. 9 Letter to Elizabeth Waller, February 1986. 10 Ibid. 11 Undated letter, Geoffrey Grigson archive. 12 Ibid. 13 John Craxton memorial service address, St James’s Piccadilly, London, 4 February 2010. 14 Author interview. 15 Letter to Freda Berkeley, December 1989, Britten Pears Arts, Aldeburgh. 16 The Independent, 7 September 1994. 17 Author interview. CHAPTER 44: KING OF CHANIA

1 Undated letter to Christopher Mason and Joanna Carrington. 2 John Craxton memorial service address, St James’s Piccadilly, London, 4 February 2010. 3 Craxton archive. 4 Letter of 22 April 1999, Leigh Fermor archive, National Library of Scotland. 5 Undated letter to Christopher Mason and Joanna Carrington.

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CHAPTER 45: GROWING YOUNG

1 2 3 4

W.S. Graham, ‘The Thermal Stair’. Author interview. Letter to author. Interview by Evita Arapoglou and Ioanna Moraiti for Charmed Lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor catalogue, Leventis, 2017. 5 Draft of undated letter, Craxton archive.

CHAPTER 46: CHARMED LIFE

1 Michael Shepherd, Sunday Telegraph, 9 October 1988. 2 Interview with Philip Vann, Artists and Illustrators magazine, May 1993. 3 Undated statement to Tim Salmon.

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Letter to author. The Independent, 9 June 2003. Ibid. Author interview. Debra Craine, The Times, 10 May 2004. John Amis, The Oldie, June 2007. Tim Salmon, draft of obituary in The Anglo-Hellenic Review, spring 2010. 11 Email to author. 12 Last Word, BBC Radio 4, 27 November 2009. 13 RA Magazine, spring 2010. EPILOGUE

1 Geordie Greig, Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist, Jonathan Cape, 2013, p. 50.

Greek Dancer, 1952 Hand-coloured linocut, 21 × 16 cm. Private collection

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CREDITS Best thanks to John Craxton for allowing this biography. He could never be boring and any dull note in his story is a failure in the writing. All other errors are also my own, but many people have made this account more enlightening and entertaining. I am most grateful to Richard Riley and the John Craxton Estate, and also to the Craxton family – especially Jane Craxton for excavating (sometimes literally) clan archives. I have been much encouraged by David Attenborough, and depended on the advice of Evita Arapoglou, the masterly assistance of Keith Roberts and the stoicism of Joachim Jacobs. And I could focus solely on this saga in a final year thanks to generous support from the Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor Arts Fund. Following in Craxton footsteps, I savoured his gregarious life via wonderful hospitality. All thanks to Catherine and Tim Nicholson, Patricia Low, and the late Elizabeth Waller on Cranborne Chase; Gill Findlater in Pembrokeshire; Frances Hickox in Edinburgh; the late Rose Hilton in Cornwall; Lucy and Robert Dorrien-Smith on Tresco; Kathy and Steve Collins in Paris; Judy Novak and Judy Natkin in New York; Olivia Stewart in Italy; Effie Paleologou on Poros; Hilary and John Spurling in Arcadia; Mary Gifford Brown on Andros; Yannis Danelis on Syros; Alexandra Pel and Leonidas Papageorgiou in Athens; Marcia and the late Michael Blakenham in Chania; and the British School at Athens in Knossos. Hail to Yale and particularly to Mark Eastment, Heather McCallum, Pamela Chambers, Chloe Foster, Ffion Jones, Charlotte Stafford, Charlotte Zaidi and Stuart Weir. I cheer designer Raymonde Watkins and project manager Anjali Bulley, and revere my editor Johanna Stephenson. I am deeply indebted to Edmée Leventis for collaborations with the A.G. Leventis foundation and gallery, and the Benaki Museum, benefiting this book. Special thanks to the late Angelos Delivorias, Georgina Dimopoulou, Irini Geroulanou, Eleftheria Goufa, Myrto Kaouki, Anastasios P. Leventis, Louisa Leventis, Loukia Loizou Hadjigavriel, George Manginis, Ioanna Providi, Demetra Theodotou Anagnostopoulou, Maria Vassilaki – and, most especially, to Ioanna Moraiti. Warm thanks to my agent, David Godwin, and Heather Godwin, Mary Scott and Philippa Sitters of David Godwin Associates. Further thanks for countless reasons to Rosie Alison, Douglas Atfield, Susan Attenborough, Joe Banks, Ariane Bankes, Diana Barbour, Mike Becket, Anthony Beevor, Carol Bell, Lesley Bellew, H. Russell Bernard, Denys Blakeway, the late Jasmine Blakeway, Bonhams, Bengt Borjeson, Chris Boyd, Harriet Bridgeman, Joanna Brogan-Higgins, Virginia Button, Jane Cameron, Fionna Carlisle, Christian Carritt, Joey Casey, Robin Cawdron-Stewart, Kostis Christakis, Andrew Churchill, Adrian Clark, Christie’s, Jonathan Clark, the late

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Prunella Clough, Christopher Cone, Cressida Connolly, Artemis Cooper, Imogen Cooper, Alex Corcoran, Charles Court, Michel Court, Martin Craxton, Oliver Craxton, the late Robin Craxton, Ruth Craxton, Shauna Mahlo Craxton, Sofia Craxton, Stephen Craxton, Louisa Creed, Tom Creedy, Jeremy Crow, Ross Daly, Penny Day, Tacita Dean, Andrew Dempsey, Alex Diamontopoulos, Dimitris Diamontopoulos, Julia Donat, Misha Donat, the late Lindy Dufferin, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, Ann Evans, the late Mary Fedden, the late Magouche Fielding, Lucian Freud Archive, Yannis Galanakis, Chris Gamble, Martin Gayford, James Glennie, Adrian Glew, Roger Graef, the late Alexander Grant, Paul Greenhalgh, Caroline Grigson, Simon Groom, the late Douglas Hall, Katherine Hamilton, Caroline Harding, Philip Harley, Clara Harrow, Gerard Hastings, Gill Hedley, Susan Hitch, the late Eileen Hogan, Lily Hosking, Suzie Hosking, the late Elizabeth Jane Howard, Simon Hucker, Helen Ireland, Pippa Jacomb, Roupen Kalfayan, Sally Kalman, Eleni Kanatsidou, Jane Kasmin, Christopher Kennington, Athina and Maria Kiriakopoulou, John Kittmer, Daphne Krinos, Andrew Lambirth, Catherine Lampert, Nicholas de Lange, the late Susan Lasdun, Patrick Leigh Fermor Literary Estate, Robin Light, Ginny Lindley, Ruth Liss, Michael Llewellyn-Smith, Katyuli Lloyd, London Metropolitan Archive, Anna Londou, Lyon & Turnbull, Jane McAusland, Robert McCabe, Neil MacGregor, Yannis Maniatis, Colin Mantripp, Mihalis Manussakis, Ruth Mariner, Simon Martin, the late Christopher Mason, Ian Massey, Kostas Mavrakakis, Joy Meaden, Jonathan Meades, David Mellor, Amy Meyers, Dimitris Michelogiannis, Claudia Milburn, Anja Milde, Vicky Minet, John Mitchell, Martin Mitchell, Matilda Mitchell, the late Konstantinos Mitsotakis, Jean-Yves Mock, Nicholas Moore, Fionn Morgan, Richard Morphet, Robin Muir, the Murlis family, Lynne Murphy, John Murray, Gillian Mussett, Marios Nikolidakis, Osborne Samuel, Nikolas Papadakis, Marianna Papageorgiou, Dimitris Papaharalambous, Michael Payne, Julian Perry, Antonia Phillips, Susannah Phillips, Nicholas and Susan Pritzker, James Pyke, the late Sonia Quennell, Katherine Quinn, Diana Rawstron, Patrick Reade, Ingram Reid, Francis Richards, Susan Richards, the late John Richardson, Nicole Roberts, Norman Rosenthal, Francis des Rosiers, Jacob Rothschild, Miranda Rothschild, James Rubens, Emily Russell, Tom Russell, Joanna Rustin, Alfie Ryan, Simon Ryan, Tim Salmon, Gordon Samuel, James Scott, Alexander Sedgwick, the late Stanley J. Seeger, Charles Saumarez Smith, Nicholas Serota, the late Brian Sewell, Andrew Shapland, Evelyn Silber, Adam Sisman, Wayne Sleep, Roy Smiljanic, Helena Smith, Kate Smith (UK Ambassador to Greece, 2017–21), Oliver Soden, Nigel Soper, Sotheby’s, the late Natasha Spender, Martin Stebbing, Peter Suschitzky, the late Wolfgang Suschitzky, Yorgos Tegos, Jeremy Thomas, Matthew Thomas, Colin Thubron, Ranald Topham-Smith, the late Barry Unsworth, the late Nanos Valaoritis, the late Anne Valery, Philip Vann, Marianna Vinther, Anneke Wills, Kim Wilkie, Moya Willson, Sal Wilson, Edmund White, Andre Zlattinger and Andreas Zombanakis.

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The painter’s palette

PICTURE CREDITS Pen and ink drawings in Parts 1 and 2 are from the 1944 book Visionary Poems and Passages or The Poet’s Eye. Those in Parts 3 and 4 are Greek sketches in mixed media made between 1952 and 2009. Craxton artwork images © John Craxton Estate. All Rights Reserved, DACS. American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Gennadius Library; image by Maria Georgopoulou 269 Arts Council Collection, South Bank Centre, London 162, 262 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 76, 181 Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki 34 Benaki Museum, Athens 258 (bottom), 347, 384 Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery 19 Bonhams 257, 300 Britten Pears Arts, Aldeburgh 208, 304 Chichester Cathedral 31 Christie’s 96 (top), 145, front cover Jonathan Clark Fine Art 54–5, 94, 179, 195 Ian Collins Archive 11, 90, 100, 280, 283 (right) John Craxton Archive 4, 27, 36, 85, 151, 154, 211, 216 (top), 217 (bottom left and right), 235, 265, 267 (bottom), 275, 328, 338, 344 (right) John Craxton Archive, © Anthony Quinn Estate 284 Craxton Family Archive 8–9, 12, 13, 16, 17, 23, 25, 29, 42, 49, 137, 219, 303 Charles Findlay 311, 342, 345, 377 © Lucian Freud Archive 87, 102, 169 © Lucian Freud Archive, Bridgeman Images 96 (bottom), 160, 163

© Lucian Freud Archive/John Craxton Estate 324 René Groebli 4, 338 Imperial War Museums 37 ING UK Art Collection 205 Joachim Jacobs 369 © Augustus John Estate, Bridgeman Images 60 © Joan Leigh Fermor Estate 148, 200, 215, 216 (bottom), 217 (top), 283 (left) Leigh Fermor Archives, National Library of Scotland 263 © Patrick Leigh Fermor Estate 100 Library and Archives Canada 253 Lyon & Turnbull 310 © Lee Miller Archive 97, 226, 227 (top) Osborne Samuel 159, 174, 182, 187, 201, 286, 297, 306, 360, 370 Phillips Family Archive 258 (top) Poros Library Archive 153 Richard Riley Archive 307 Royal Institute of British Architects 267 (top) Sainsbury Centre, Norwich 45 (left and right) National Gallery of Scotland 39 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 115 Roy Smiljanic 361 Sotheby’s 140, 156, 157, 166, 247, 295 Tacita Dean 127, 365 Tallis Foundation 15 Tate 69, 111, 135 University of Stirling 309 © Wolfgang Suschitzky Estate 259, 260 Matthew Thomas 355 (top), 367 Vogue, the Condé Nast Publications Ltd 229 Yale Center for British Art 329

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INDEX Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations Abercorn Place, London 17, 90, 90, 95, 98, 101, 103, 125 Abinger Hill School 27–8 Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Paris 52–3 Académie Julian, Paris 53, 220 Achillopoulos, Costas 215, 216 Acomb Lodge, St John’s Wood 12–16, 18–20, 25, 44, 48–50, 53, 56, 71, 302 Aid to Russia exhibition, London (1942) 101 Alderholt Mill House 71, 98 Alexakis, Kostas 155–6 Algiers 188 Allinson, Adrian 126, 281 Alma Tadema, Lawrence 18 Andrews, Dorothy 288, 316, 331 Andrews, Kevin 192 Anglo-Russian Café, Leicester Square 126 Apollo 293–5 Arias, Roberto ‘Tito’ 221–2, 265 Armitage, Edward 18 Arts Council 176, 203, 245 Ashton, Frederick 187, 206 –10, 212–18, 217, 220–1, 236, 254, 279, 293–4, 296, 360 Astor, Judy and Michael 301, 303–4 Athens 144–9, 165, 245 –6, 277, 283 Attenborough, David 99, 124, 252, 329, 336, 342–3, 350, 364 Attwell, Mabel Lucie 72 Auden, W.H. 77, 118, 122–3, 255–6 Ayrton, Michael 50–1, 52, 118, 128, 256, 329 Bachardy, Don 302 Bacon, Francis 116, 138, 176, 187, 202, 210, 229–30, 236, 245, 261, 266, 313, 320, 322–3 Balanchine, George 293, 294 Barber, Samuel 187, 290, 294, 310 Barford, Teddy 48, 50 Barling, Elsie 28, 34, 34, 35 Bates, Alan 283–4, 286

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Bayon family 105 –7 BBC 19, 29, 78, 175–6, 224, 252, 307, 319, 325, 338 Becket, Mike 361 Becket, St Thomas 35, 36 Beddington, John 48 Beecham, Thomas 29 Bell, George, Bishop of Chichester 30 Benaki Museum, Athens 343–4, 347, 369 Beny, Roloff 253 Bérard, Christian 51, 138 Berkeley, Lennox 303, 319, 343 Berman, Eugene 51, 256 Betjeman, John 18, 236 Betteshanger School 33–6, 36, 38 –9 Birkett, Rebecca 27, 311 Blake, William 32, 35, 75, 77, 78, 80, 86, 112, 114, 119, 320, 364 Satan Exulting Over Eve 110–11, 111 Blunt, Anthony 138– 9, 235, 306 Bole, Allen 291, 316 Bonaparte, Princess Marie 88, 89, 175, 264 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 30 Borenius, Tancred 61 Bosnian War (1992–5) 348–9 Bounialis, Konstantinos Tzanes, The Nativity of Christ 272, 272 Boyle, Viscount Richard 35 Britannia (royal yacht) 330 British Council 152, 176, 201, 203, 224, 335 British Museum, London 181, 208, 272, 299, 340, 366 Britten, Benjamin 110, 119–20, 202, 245, 304 Brooke, Rupert 35 Brown, Francis James ‘Jimmy’ 290 Brown, Oliver 104, 109–10, 202, 297, 307 Buchholz Gallery, New York 126 Buckle, Richard 213, 220, 294 Bumpus, Judith 325 Burgess, Guy 100, 273 Bürgi, Rolf and Kathie 141

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Burlington Magazine 308 Butler, Reg 196–200 Butt, Dame Clara 23, 24 Byzantine art 151, 157, 182, 188, 199, 230, 277–8, 334 Cacoyannis (formerly Yannis), Michael 72, 260, 283–5 Café Royal, London 86, 87, 90 Calder, Alexander 39, 40, 52 Cambridge Theatre, London 53 Camp, Jeffery 351, 358 Carlisle, Fionna 353 Carrington, Joanna 278–9 Carritt, Christian 353 Ceccoli, Raphael 158 Cecil, David 70, 76 Central Schools, London 57–8, 120 Chagall, Marc 15, 234, 242–4 Chania, Crete 262–9, 263, 267, 269, 277, 285–91, 298–9, 316–18, 327–32, 334, 340–3, 348, 357–8, 365, 369, 369 Chatwin, Bruce 291, 332 Chetwode, Lord 18 Chetwode, Penelope 18 Chichester 10 –11, 11, 28, 30–2 Chirico, Giorgio de 51, 163, 322 Churchill, Winston 144, 147, 265–6, 265 Clark, Kenneth 72 –3, 107, 109 –10, 116, 119, 126, 138, 203, 207, 210, 296 Clausen, George 19 Clayesmore School 41, 44 Clift, Charmian 238, 258, 260–1, 280 Clifton Hill Studios, St John’s Wood 125–6, 129, 228, 234, 281 Clouet, François 53, 301 Clough, Prunella 366 Coates, Eric 29 –30 Cobham, Eleanor Meredith 47 Coghill, Nevill 77 Cohen, Leonard 261, 281 Colquhoun, Robert 53, 74–5, 95, 111, 118, 128, 138, 224–5, 296 Cone, Christopher 320 –1, 321, 330, 340

Connolly, Cyril 58, 82 –3, 89, 130, 134, 136, 140, 187, 202, 230, 296 Cooper, Douglas 185 –6, 212 Corneille de Lyon 53 Costakis, George 272–3 Cotman, John Sell 76 Cottrell, T.L. 308–9 Court, Charles and Germaine 51–2, 63 Covent Garden see Royal Opera House Cowell, W.S. 118, 120, 121 Crawford, O.G.S. 61–2 Craxton, Alisi 320 Craxton, Antony 14, 19, 25, 26, 48, 56 –7, 71, 78, 103 –4, 224, 228, 319–20 Craxton, Essie 10–16, 18, 23–9, 23, 33, 41, 48, 50, 52, 56–7, 63, 65, 71, 85, 89, 125, 132, 219, 219, 294, 299, 302, 303, 313, 318–19 Craxton, Harold 10 –19, 13, 21–4, 25, 30, 38, 47–8, 56–7, 73, 99, 136 –7, 203, 205–6, 219–20, 224, 302, 303, 307, 354, 368 Craxton, Jane 320 Craxton, Janet 25, 26, 48, 63, 80, 136, 140, 188, 245, 256–7, 296, 301–3, 307, 310, 313, 319 –20 Craxton, John, artworks 4, 12–13, 25, 154, 160, 211, 215–17, 229, 253, 259, 265, 267, 275, 284, 311, 338, 344–5, 355, 365, 367 An Acrobatic Cretan Butcher 156 Alderholt Mill 111–12, 112 Beach Scene 152 Bigwigs Overboard 172 The Blue Horse 340, 341 Boat in an Estuary 116 Boot in an Estuary 116 Boy on a Blue Chair 160, 162 Boy with a Fever 342 The Butcher 236 Cat, Tree and Bird (The Blue Tree) 356, 357, 358, 359 Cats Playing 157 Chania 379 Chrismouse Card 360 Cretan Cats 358, 359, 369 Cretan Cats Flower Pot 329–30, 329 A Cretan Priest 198

Daphnis and Chloë 206–13, 209, 249, 292, 294–5, 295, 360–2, 361 Death of Thomas Beckett mural 36 Drawing of Chania harbour 263 Dreamer in Landscape 81–3, 83 Elegiac Figure (in Memory of Peter Watson) 247 Five Goats 257 Four Figures in a Mountain Landscape 203, 204–5, 204 A Freud Figure in a Craxton Landscape 324 Galatas 165–6, 203 Girl on Seashore 205 Goose 106 Greek Farm 165, 166 Greek Fisherman 133 Hare on a Table 139, 139 Homage to Alones 194, 202 Hotel by the Sea 151–2, 153, 186–7 I Am With Child 363 Into the Ravine 303 Landscape, Hydra 262, 278 Landscape on Plywood 240 Landscape with the Elements 308–10, 309 Landscape with Poet and Birdcatcher 94–5, 94, 101 Landscape with Rocks 104 Lion Drinking 304, 304 Lucian 160, 161 Mezedes 342 Moonlit Landscape 84, 84 Moonlit Ravine 312 Musician in Taverna 300, 300 Owl 274, 274, 298 Pastoral for P.W. 190, 191, 359 Peter Watson 59 The Pied Piper of Hamelin 49 Poet and Moon 123 Poet in Landscape 80 –3, 81, 97, 190, 246 Portrait of Christopher Cone 320 –1, 321 Portrait of Sonia 134, 135 Pots from Crichel Down, Dorset 61 Ravine 289 Reclining Figure with Asphodels I 335–6, 337 Red and Yellow Landscape 133 Sawn-up Trees 101

Seated Man 306 Self-Portrait (1942) 96 Self-Portrait (1945) 296 Self-Portrait (1946–7) 145 Self Portrait at a Window 140 Shepherds at Night 194, 195 Shepherds near Knossos 179 Soldier and Slivovitz 348–9, 349 ‘Spanish Torture’ 189 Still Life with Cat and Child 254, 255 Still Life with Three Sailors 333–5, 334 Sunlit Ravine 339 Three Dancers – Poros 233 Three Figures and Setting Sun 249–50, 252 Tree Root in a Welsh Estuary 127, 365 Trees and Ruins 101 Two Bathers 239 Two Figures and Setting Sun 250 –1, 251–2 Two Greek Dancers 208 Two Men in Taverna 243 Voskos 335, 336 Welsh Estuary Foreshore 114, 115 Welsh Landscape with Sleeping Reaper 117 Woman and Dog in Front of the Moon (copy of Miró pochoir) 348, 348 Craxton, Michael 14, 18, 25, 48, 68, 320 Craxton, Robin 14, 25, 28, 30, 32, 41, 48, 56–7, 78, 103–4, 223–4, 320 Craxton, Sarah 21, 22 Craxton, Thomas 21–2 Craxton, Tim 14, 25, 25, 48, 50, 56, 68, 78, 105, 120–1, 131, 320 Cretan School icons 272–3 Crete 149, 177– 85, 191–201, 203, 209, 220, 232, 263–71, 281–91, 298– 9, 309, 316–18, 327–35, 338–43, 345–8, 357–8, 362, 364 Croft-Cooke, Rupert 223 Crome, John 76 Cycladic Female Figure 45 Cyprus 231–2, 316 Daly, Ross 317–18 Dandaroulaki, Katina 318

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Daphnis and Chloë 206 –13, 209, 222, 243, 249, 292, 294–5, 295, 343, 361 David, Elizabeth 202 Davidson, Harold 99 de Jong, Piet and Effie 178, 181, 183, 184 Deakin, John 108, 229, 229, 313 Dean, Tacita 330, 365, 365 Delacroix, Eugène 74, 188, 303 Despotopoulos, Rigas 152 Devonshire, Duchess of 301, 362 Devonshire, Duke of 301 Diamantopoulos, Aleca Stylou 157, 245 Diamantopoulos, Mina 156 –7 Donat, John 267, 270–1 Douglas, Bill 43 Dufy, Raoul 40, 150, 330 Duncan-Jones, Arthur 31 Durrell, Lawrence 150, 173, 239, 287, 288 East, Alfred 18 East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing 88 Edinburgh Tapestry Company 308–10 El Greco 38, 50, 112, 138, 170, 177, 182, 189–90, 270, 271, 363 An Allegory (Fábula) 38, 39 Eleftheriades, Stratis 243 Eliki 214–19, 220 Embassy Theatre, Hampstead 293 Epstein, Jacob 103, 126, 129 Epstein, Kitty (Kitty Garman) 176, 324, 326 Ernst, Jimmy 111 Ernst, Max 62, 74, 101, 111, 126–7, 140, 226 Evans, Sir Arthur 62, 178–81, 222 Eyres Monsell, Joan see Leigh Fermor, Joan Faulkner, Amy 24, 36, 41–4, 42, 50, 53, 56, 59, 62–6, 69, 318 Faulkner, C.W. & Co. 23, 53, 68, 360 Faulkner, Charles William 23, 24 Faulkner, Sylvia 24, 34, 36, 48–9, 53, 59, 63, 65, 140 Fedden, Mary 287, 329, 351 Festival of Britain (1951) 203, 204–5, 209

380

Fielding, Alexander Wallace (Xan) 148–9, 183, 192, 282, 345– 6 The Stronghold 227, 227 Fielding, Magouche 257–8, 258, 282, 296, 298, 303, 307, 326, 345–6, 369 Findlay, Charles 311, 333, 336–7 First World War 10, 24, 29, 30, 35, 246 Fisher, Tom Hart 214, 217, 221 Fleischmann, Julius ‘Junkie’ 225, 292–3 Fleming, Annie 301, 305, 322, 324 Fleming, Caspar 305 Fonteyn, Margot 207, 209–22, 211, 216–17, 265, 296, 324, 360–1 Ford, Charles Henri 290 –1 Ford, Richard Onslow 18 Fowles, John 166–7 Françaix, Jean 302 France 175, 256–7 see also Paris Freud, Clement 87–8, 104 Freud, Ernst 87–8, 296 Freud, Lucian 58, 73–4, 84–93, 85, 87, 98–9, 101–6, 102, 108–10, 115 –16, 124, 125, 129–35, 137–8, 147, 159 –67, 161, 169 –71, 175, 176, 185 –7, 202, 230, 234, 235, 245, 261, 296, 322–6, 340, 368–9 Boy in Bed with Fruit 96 Café Royal letter 86, 87 Head of a Greek Man 163 Lounge lizard letter 102–3 Portrait of a Man 160, 160, 186, 202–3 Truant with George Millar 169 Freud, Sigmund 87, 88, 89, 91, 138 Galerie Pierre, Paris 137 Gallico, Paul 94– 5 Galsworthy, John 17 Gardiner, Clive 98, 138 Gardiner, Charles Wrey, The Once Loved God 107, 108, 108 Gascoyne, David 58, 78, 124, 354–5, 355 Gasser, Hans Ulrich 138 Ghika, Barbara 253–4, 253, 257–9, 258, 279, 282, 296, 305, 312–13, 343, 348

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Ghika, Nico 136, 138, 149, 170, 234, 238–41, 245, 246, 253–4, 253, 258–9, 258, 261, 277, 279–80, 283, 293, 296, 297, 305, 312–13, 343–4, 344, 348 Terrace on Kriezotou Street 344 Ghika, Tiggie 149, 240, 253, 279 Ghika Gallery, Athens 344 Giacometti, Alberto 52, 137, 187, 230–1, 253 Gielgud, John 223 Gifford, East Lothian 310 Gilbert, Jean 15, 207 Glock, Clement 209 Goldsmiths College, London 98, 138–9 Goodman, Arnold 323, 324 Goya, Francisco de 39, 74 Grace, Harvey 28, 30 Graves, Ida Affleck 120 Gray-Fisk, Clinton 99, 125 Greece see individual places Greek Civil War (1946–49) 144–6, 159, 192–3, 276 Grierson, Douglas 309 Grigson, Geoffrey 75, 108, 118–19, 122–3, 126, 188–90, 341–2, 366 The Scilly Isles and Other Poems 133, 134 Grigson, Jane 341–2 Groebli, René 4, 338 Guinness, Meraud 175 Haldeman, Charles 288 –91, 292–3, 316 Hall, Douglas 310–11 Hamet Gallery, London 307 Hamilton, Sir Abdullah 29 Hamnett, Nina 75 Harold Craxton Memorial Trust 307, 320 harpsichord 310–11, 310 Hartley, L.P. 70 Hawker, Harry 35 Hebborn, Eric 139 Hepworth, Barbara 70, 101, 132, 187, 293, 296 Heron-Allen, Edward 29 Hess, Myra 73 Hitler, Adolf 30, 35, 50, 64, 68, 91, 149, 234, 266 Hockney, David 295, 310, 342, 351 Hodgkins, Frances 34 Elsie Barling 34

Hogan, Eileen and Harold 316–17 Holland, Daisy 14–15, 48 Hope Scott Trust 310–11 Horizon 58, 59, 69, 74, 75, 81–3, 95, 107, 128, 130, 135–6, 138, 140, 176, 187–8, 190, 202 Horniman, Ben 223–4 Horniman family 24 Howard, Elizabeth Jane 11, 16, 47–8, 49, 89–90, 129, 237, 326, 364 Howe, Sir Geoffrey 345 Hughes-Stanton, Blair 120 Hull, Christopher 324, 329–30, 333, 335, 348, 350, 351 Humby, Betty 29 Hydra 170, 214, 234, 237 –43, 249 –51, 254, 258 – 62, 259 –60, 277 –81, 280, 287 Iliff, James 58, 73 Ill Met by Moonlight (film) 254 Institute of Contemporary Arts 187, 202, 207, 226 International Exhibition of Art and Technology, Paris (1937) 39 –40 Ireland 301 Ironside, Robin 203 Isaacs, Harold 14 Italy 220 –1, 277, 337 Jenkins, Roy and Jennifer 300 John, Augustus 53, 60, 62, 71, 75 Trelawney Dayrell Reed 60, 60 John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings (book) 190 John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings 1941–1966, London 296– 7 John Craxton: Portraits 1942 –1992, London 350 Johnston, George 238, 258, 260 –1, 280 Judge, Miss (Judgie) 25–6 Kalman, Andras 245, 323 Kardamyli 283, 283, 343 Kazantzakis, Nikos 283–5 Keating, Tom 138 Keen, Arthur 136, 137 Keiller, Alexander 61 Kendrick, T.D. 62, 311 Kennington, Christopher 36

Kennington, Eric 37–8, 80 The Kensingtons at Laventie 37, 37 Kent, Duke of 345 Kenya 303–4 Kidderpore Avenue, Hampstead 136 –7, 137, 254, 270, 279, 318–19, 320, 362–3 King, Francis 224 Klee, Paul 74, 101, 110, 140, 150, 187, 188, 226 Klee-Stumpf, Lily 140 Knossos 178–81, 183, 184, 222, 258 Koutsoupis, Angelos 174, 218 Kray twins 322–3 Kreipe, General 148, 179, 199, 254 Kyasht, Lydia 53 Lambert, Constant 211, 220, 222 Lambert, Isabel (formerly Delmer) 91, 220, 250 Lancaster, Osbert 141, 202, 271 Larronde, Olivier 139 Lasdun, Denys 343 Lassally, Walter 284, 286 Lawrence, D.H. 42 Lawrence, T.E. 37, 62 Lawrence, Thomas 21 Lear, Edward 136, 269 Chania 269 Lee, Laurie 103 Lefevre Gallery, London 95, 129, 138 Lehmann, John 82, 126, 128–9, 170, 187 Leicester Galleries, London 104, 109–10, 125–7, 130, 202, 220, 229, 245, 297, 307 Leigh Fermor, Joan (née Eyres Monsell) 100, 100, 141, 148–9, 148, 200, 214–15, 216–17, 220–1, 239 –40, 246, 248–9, 253, 253, 263, 264, 268–9, 275, 282–3, 283, 296, 299, 343, 345–6, 358–9 Leigh Fermor, Patrick (Paddy) 147–9, 148, 168, 173, 179, 183, 184, 192, 193, 201, 205, 214–18, 215, 217, 220–1, 239–40, 246, 248–9, 253, 275, 283, 296, 327, 333–4, 343, 345–6, 350–1, 353, 362 Joan 100 Mani 248, 249 Roumeli 275–6, 276, 292 A Time of Gifts 317, 317

Les-Baux-de-Provence 256– 7 Lett-Haines, Arthur 88 Libya 304–5 Listener, The 104 Llanthony Priory 83–4, 94 Loeb, Pierre 137–8 London Gallery 109, 141, 185–6, 201, 202 Londou, Anna 168–9 Lord, James 230 –1, 354 Lord’s cricket ground 16, 16, 18, 19, 48 Lubbock, Lys 130, 140, 187 Lygon, Lady Dorothy (Coote) 274–5, 298 Maar, Dora 101, 115, 137, 230, 253, 354 MacBryde, Robert 53, 74–5, 95, 111, 128, 138, 224–5 McCormack, John 10 Macdonald, Joey 65–6 McGill, Donald 95 Mackinlay, Jean Sterling 68 MacMillan, Kenneth 293 Macnab, Iain 50 Magruder, Agnes (Magouche) see Fielding, Magouche Mantripp, Colin 327–8 Marylebone Cricket Club 18 Maschler, Tom 290 Mason, Christopher 261–2, 263–8, 267, 270, 274, 278–9, 369 Massine, Léonide 221 Masson, André 101, 115 Mastropetros family 150–2, 156, 160–3, 165, 171, 175, 189, 204–5, 207, 210, 214, 231, 234, 245, 316 Matisse, Henri 34, 40, 100 –1, 110, 138, 187, 188, 212, 253, 272, 348 Matthay, Tobias 22 Mavrakakis, Kostas 346, 347 Melly, George 185, 186 Meninsky, Bernard 57–8 Menotti, Gian Carlo 187, 290, 310 Meredith, George 18 Merrill, James 290 Mesens, E.L.T. 109, 185–6 Mesens, Sybil 185 Messel, Oliver 207, 210 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 174, 321

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Milkin, Jacques 51, 63, 129 Milkina, Nina 15, 15, 51, 73, 129, 307 Milkina, Sophie 51, 63, 129 Millar, George 169, 171 Millard, Pat 57 Miller, Henry 150, 239, 287, 288 Miller, Lee 109, 225–7, 244, 273, 296 Graham Sutherland 97 Painting with Tony Penrose 227 Self Portrait with Sphinxes 226 Minchington, Dorset 41–4, 42, 62, 63–4, 69 Minoan seal ring 181, 181 Minton, John 50 –1, 52, 57, 128, 176, 202, 203, 225, 256 Miró, Joan 39, 40, 74, 90, 101, 108, 114, 115, 133, 137, 163, 187, 226, 348, 358 Mitchell-Smith, Molly 126, 281 Mitsotakis, Konstantinos 274, 316, 347, 354 Mitsotakis, Marika 274, 354 Montgomery, Viscount 149 Moore, George 17 Moore, Henry 50, 73, 74, 101, 110, 126, 174, 187, 226, 244 Moore, Nicholas 124, 330, 339–40, 342, 347, 348 Moores, Pat 186 Morley College, London 256 Morocco 305– 6 Morris, Cedric 88 Mortimer, Raymond 81, 104, 130, 141 Moschon, Crete 264, 268–9, 274, 281–3, 317–18, 327–32, 341–3, 342, 348, 358 Mummy Portrait of a Young Man 45 Murdoch, Iris 292 Murphy, John ‘Spud’ 234–5, 235, 255–6, 306, 319 Murray, John 248– 9, 351, 362 Myers, Leo 70 Nan Kivell, Rex de Charembac 305–6 Nash, Paul 46, 48, 50, 97, 101, 154 Monster Field 69, 69 National Gallery, London 72–3, 80 National Portrait Gallery, London 350–1

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Neo-Romantic movement 51, 53, 81, 116, 128, 256, 307, 340 Neurath, Walter 118 Nevinson, C.R.W. 336 New Burlington Galleries, London 202 New Excursions into English Poetry 118, 121 Newton, Eric 50, 202 Niarchos, Stavros 170, 274, 275 Nicholson, Ben 70, 71, 98, 101, 132, 138, 187, 230, 245 Nicholson, Christopher (Kit) 70, 71, 75, 98, 284–5 Nicholson, E.Q. 70–2, 75, 83–4, 98, 104, 111, 112, 119, 126–9, 131, 133–4, 146, 169, 171–2, 176, 190–1, 284–5, 296 Nolan, Sidney 246 Northbourne, Lord 33 Norton, Sir Clifford 141, 146, 149, 184, 307 Norton, Lady ‘Peter’ 141,146, 148–9, 159, 165, 170–1, 185, 190, 196, 206, 224, 244, 272, 274, 296, 307 Oliver, Mark 38, 39–40, 138, 271 Oliver, Robin 38, 39–40 Olney, Richard 231 Orwell, George 95 Page, Ruth 214, 217 Palmer, Samuel 75–6, 80–1, 86, 98, 110, 114, 119, 183, 366 The Valley Thick with Corn 75, 76 Paolozzi, Eduardo 309, 351 Paouri, Catherine 242–4 Papas, Irene 283–5 Paris 50–3, 63, 129, 137–8, 139, 230 –1, 253, 303 Parker, George 59–60 Paros 219 Partridge, Frances 20 Paterakis, Manolis 199, 200–1, 200, 346 Pears, Peter 110, 202–3, 245, 304 Pendlebury, John 138, 178–9 Penguin New Writing 82, 126, 128–9, 170, 187, 202 Penrose, Roland 101, 102, 109, 115, 185, 187, 225, 244, 296, 311 Penrose, Tony 226, 227 Perles, Alfred (Fred) 288, 316

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Philipps, Sir John 114, 116, 130, 246–8 Picasso, Pablo 34, 39–40, 50, 52, 74, 75, 77, 82, 99, 101–2, 110–12, 114, 115, 134, 137–8, 163, 175, 186, 187, 202, 212, 222, 225, 226, 230, 271–3, 278, 328, 354 Piggott, Stuart and Peggy 62, 70, 71, 291 Piper, John 5, 48, 57, 73, 84, 97–8, 101, 110, 118, 128, 209, 310, 337, 342 Piper, Myfanwy 98, 203, 342 Pitt Rivers, Michael 223 Pitt Rivers Museum, Farnham 44–5, 61 The Poet’s Eye 118–19, 120, 121–4, 122–3, 340 Pollard, April 50–1, 52 Polunin, Vladimir 34 Pool, Phoebe 187 Poros 149, 150 –8, 190, 203, 204–6, 209, 225, 232 –4, 243 Port Regis school 28 Poussin, Nicolas 39, 73, 74, 107 Powell, Michael 254 Pratt, Ross 15 Prebendal School, Chichester 28, 30 –2 Price, Reynolds 254–6 Procktor, Patrick 305– 6 Providi, Ioanna 344 Psari, Eleni 163–5 Psychoundakis, George 193–4, 346 The Cretan Runner 193, 193 Quennell, Sonia ‘Spider’ 132–5, 135, 296, 369 Quinn, Anthony 283–6, 284 Raising of Lazarus 31, 31 Read, Herbert 187, 203–4 Redfern Gallery, London 50, 101 Reed, Trelawney Dayrell 44, 60–3, 60, 64–6 Rembrandt 38, 364 Renault, Mary 224 Rendall, Arthur Dacres 38 Rendel, A.M., Appointment In Crete 227 Reni, Guido 39 Richardson, Alan 15, 302, 310 Riley, Richard 307, 307, 308, 311, 316, 317, 343, 348, 358, 362–3, 365, 369

Ripolin paints 111–12 Roberts, Keith 252 Roberts, William 57–8, 358 Robertson, Bryan 245, 277, 294, 295–7 Royal Academy, London 17–18, 23, 138, 222, 351, 358, 363 Royal Academy of Music, London 10, 15, 22, 29, 68, 107, 140, 302 Royal Opera House, London 205–13, 220, 221, 224–5, 293–5, 301, 320, 339, 360–1 Rubens, Charles 14, 323 Rubens, Peter Paul 39 Russell, John 296 Russell, Maud 300–1, 311 Russell, Tom 331 Russia 272–4 Ryan, Betty 288, 291, 316 Sadlers Wells Ballet 206–13 St John’s Wood, London 17–20, 17 Salisbury School of Art and Crafts 59 Salmon, Tim 287–8, 363 Santley, Charles 18 Saumarez Smith, Charles 350 Schilsky, Eric 58 Scilly Isles 132–5, 171, 245, 254–5 Scott, Peter 47, 129 Scottish Baroque Ensemble 310–11 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 310, 325 Second World War 53, 56–92, 107–13, 124, 127–31, 144, 149, 179–80, 234, 349 Seeger, Stanley 290, 311, 316, 320–1, 328, 330, 340 Seferis, George 5, 147, 167–8, 170, 239, 245, 304, 307 Seferis, Maro 167, 168, 304, 307 Selsey, Sussex 28–30, 29, 56, 115 Shannon, Sheila 118, 121, 126 Sherriff, Robert Cedric 29 Signoret, Simone 283, 285, 286 Somerville, Lilian 176 Spanish Civil War (1936–39) 39–40, 50, 58 Spender, Matthew 275, 282, 303 Spender, Natasha 87, 89, 225, 244, 254, 275, 282, 326 Spender, Stephen 58, 76, 87, 89, 187, 225, 244, 254, 275, 282, 296, 324

Spurling, Hilary 252, 364 Stavroulakis, Nikos 290–1, 316, 350 Stokes, Ann 313, 313 Stravinsky, Igor 38, 128, 190, 293–4 Surrealism 51, 58, 93, 107, 108–9, 111, 114–15, 185–6 Suschitzky, Wolfgang 239, 259, 259, 260 Sutherland, Graham 48, 50, 69, 73, 74, 82, 95–8, 97, 101, 110, 113–16, 120, 123, 128, 138, 151, 176, 188, 203, 207, 209, 266, 282, 293, 310, 348 Swiss Cottage Café, London 72 Tambimuttu, Meary James Thurairajah 92, 173 Tate Gallery, London 187, 320, 340 Tavener, John 353–4 Tchelitchew, Pavel 51, 207 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 122 Thomas, Jeremy 29 Thomas, Matthew 354, 367 Tippett, Michael 71, 119–20, 293, 320 Tissot, Jacques Joseph 18 Todd, Ruthven 108–9, 110–11 The Lost Traveller 108, 109 Tonks, Henry 35 Trevelyan, Julian 101, 114–15, 130, 132, 138, 287, 329, 356 Trevor-Roper, Patrick 352 Tsarouchis, Yannis 170, 245–6, 348 Turner, W.J. 118, 126 Twombly, Cy 331 University of Stirling 308–10 Valaoritis, Nanos 135–6, 166 The Punishment of Wizards 164, 165 Valentin, Curt 126 Van Eyck, Jan and Hubert 30 Vassilaki, Maria 346, 363 Vaughan, Keith 128, 225, 342 Vaughan Williams, Ralph 49, 302 Venice Biennale 50, 230, 245 Venizelos, Eleftherios 146, 192, 264–5, 274 Vilató, Javier 138 Vogue 108, 133, 225–6, 229, 229

Wales 113–17, 121 Waller, Cecil ‘Bim’ 41, 42, 43–4, 50, 53, 56, 59, 62–6, 69, 95, 139 Nina Milkina 15 Waller, Elizabeth 63, 373 Waller, Evelyn (Tanta) 43, 44, 73 Wallis, Henry 18 The Stonebreaker 18, 19 Walton, William, Troilus and Cressida 293 Wanamaker, Sam 293 War Artists Advisory Committee 73, 119 Watson, Peter 5, 52, 58–9, 59, 74–7, 81–3, 90, 95–8, 101, 107, 113–15, 124–6, 128, 130, 137, 140, 147, 167, 175, 185, 187–90, 202, 207, 223, 246–8, 282, 296 Welch, Denton 116, 220 West, Anthony 155 West, Benjamin 23 Wheeler, Mortimer 27, 50, 62 White, Edmund 331–2 Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 245, 249, 251, 292, 295–7, 307, 308 Whittemore, Edward 316–17 Whitworth, Frank and Peggy 26 Wilde, Gerald 103 Wilenski, R.H. 104 Wilkie, Kim 252 Williams, Harcourt 68 Willoughby, Hugh 101–2, 115 Wilson, Colin St John 188 Wishart, Lorna 103, 110, 135, 176 Wolfenden Committee 223–4, 342 Wood, Christopher (Kit) 50, 74, 112, 138, 175, 211, 319 Woodcock, Patrick 352 Woolf, Virginia 19, 70, 82, 220, 253 The World of Sholem Aleichem 293 Wright, David 301 Wyeth, Andrew 44 Yeames, William Frederick 18 Yorke, Malcolm 340 Zervos, Christian 175 Zorba the Greek (film) 283–6 Zorian, Olive 15 Zurich 138, 140–1

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If you have enjoyed this life of John Craxton please support, as he did, the Benaki Museum and the British School at Athens.

Entry in the Joan and Paddy Leigh Fermor guestbook, Kardamyli, Greece First published by Yale University Press 2021 Paperback edition first published 2023 302 Temple Street, P.O. Box 209040, New Haven CT 06520-9040 47 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP yalebooks.com / yalebooks.co.uk Text copyright © 2021 Ian Collins All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without prior permission in writing from the publisher. e-ISBN 978-0-300-27605-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941527 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 2027 2026 2025 2024 2023 Text design: Raymonde Watkins Cover design: Studio Noel Project Editor: Johanna Stephenson Printed in China Front cover: Self-Portrait, 1946–7 Back cover: Two Men in Taverna, 1953 Half-title page: Mermaid from Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1966 Title page: Ivy frame from sheet music for Michael Tippett’s 1944 double motet Plebs Angelica pp. 8–9: The Pied Piper of Hamelin stage backdrop, c.1937 pp. 54–5: Landscape with Poet and Birdcatcher, 1942 pp. 144–5: Pastoral for P.W., 1948 pp. 314–5: Reclining Figure with Asphodels I, 1983–4