John Craxton R.A. (British, 1922-2009)
Self-portrait

signed and dated 'Craxton 44' (upper right)
oil on canvas
Painted in 1943-4

Dimensions: 61 x 47 cm. (24 x 18 1/2 in.)

Ian L Phillips, circa 1944, thence by descent to the present owner

Exhibited:
Possibly: London, The Leicester Galleries, Paintings and Drawings by John Craxton, June 1944, cat.no.16
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, John Craxton, Paintings and Drawings 1941-1966, Jan-Feb 1967, no.4

We are grateful to Dr Ian Collins and Richard Riley for their assistance in cataloguing this lot

London-raised John Craxton (1922-2009), largely self-taught as an artist, came to public attention at the age of 19. It all began when patron Peter Watson reproduced a bravura drawing Poet in Landscape in Horizon magazine.

An ensuing war-time flow of lonely figures in menaced terrain were emblematic portraits of the artist himself. He became the poster boy for the Neo-Romantic movement before the term was coined.

At 19 Craxton also met Lucian Freud, and the teenage renegades were promptly set up in adjoining studios by the faithful Peter Watson and left free to work as they wished on highly imaginative paintings and drawings. Although both artists were distinctive and divergent from the outset, there was a great deal of cross-pollination between them.

As each evolved subtle and idiosyncratic motifs and symbols, Craxton and Freud flirted with surrealism. At dinners in Soho's Barcelona restaurant hosted by Belgian painter E.L.T. Mesens, they 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.

Through Watson, Craxton had also become close to Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Paul Nash. He went with Sutherland to Pembrokeshire, whose spiky vegetation and rugged landscape was as near as he could get to the Greece of his dreams. For him, it was nowhere near enough.

This pivotal 1943 Craxton self-likeness, to which the artist probably added a finishing touch in 1944, hence the date upper-right, evolved around the time of Freud's Man with a Feather. The strange juxtaposition of the 21-year-old painter with a plant prefigures the later Freud images Man with Thistle (Self-Portrait) (1946) and Self-Portrait with Hyacinth in a Pot (1947-8).

The tropical Dracaena fragrans foliage depicted here is a fitting choice for an artist who hated the cold, dark constriction of war-bound England and longed to escape to a life in the sun. Having been forced back from Paris in the summer of 1939 by approaching conflict, he wilted on a besieged island.

Failing an army medical, Craxton was frequently ill: in a 1943 Freud drawing Boy in Bed with Fruit, quinces hint at the yellow of his jaundiced skin. The wary look was characteristic of his war-time persona where nervy energy and bouts of debilitation pointed to undiagnosed tuberculosis. He needed a hot climate more than he ever knew.

Craxton's breakthrough would come in the spring of 1944, at a sell-out Leicester Galleries exhibition. The show coincided with the D-Day Landings which began the liberation of Europe and would ultimately allow his flight abroad.

By the summer of 1945 Craxton and Freud could roam only as far as the Aegean-like Scilly Isles. They were foiled in a bid to stow away on a Breton fishing boat to get to Paris, Picasso and then the Mediterranean.

John Craxton flew to Greece in the spring of 1946. Freud joined him for five months, but Craxton never looked back - working on sunburst Greek inspired pictures (absorbing mythology, archaeology, Byzantine mosaics and modernism in a very personal iconography) for the rest of his life.

The self-absorbed figure of a haunted youth was left far behind. He became a portraitist of other people - flowering in the sunshine; living for pleasure and painting it too.

The vivid red and yellow tie in this poignant picture is a premonition of a bright world to come.

We are grateful to Dr Ian Collins for compiling this catalogue entry

(Dr Ian Collins is the author of the Runciman Prize-winning biography John Craxton: A Life of Gifts (Yale University Press) and curator of numerous Craxton exhibitions.