John Craxton (1922 – 2009)

Biography: John Craxton was a leading painter of the Neo-Romantic movement of the 1940s, along with the Scots painters Colquhoun and MacBryde, and also influenced by Picasso and Samuel Palmer. John Craxton studied at Westminster and Central Schools of Art, and also at Goldsmith’s. There he befriended Lucien Freud and he also knew Graham Sutherland. Although he disliked being dubbed a ‘Neo-Romantic’, John Craxton worked mainly in the spirit of this 1940s British art movement. After the Second World War he began to travel, visiting Greece for the first time in 1946, and eventually settling in Hania, Crete. In the 1970s he returned to live in Britain for a time, due to the political situation in Greece.