John Craxton in Greece.
Hellenophiles fill the history books from Hadrian to Lord Byron and the Durrells, but few loved Greece as much as the British artist, John Craxton.
At a dinner in Zurich in May 1946, the British painter John Craxton had what can only be described as a monumental stroke of good luck. It was the opening night of his first continental exhibition and Lady ‘Peter’ Norton, the art-mad ex gallerist seated next to him, wanted to know his plans. It was simple: he longed to be in Greece.
Sixteen and happily studying life drawing in Paris, Craxton had been forced back to the safe confines of Blighty as war loomed large on the horizon in 1939. Seven dark years passed dreaming only of Europe, and Greece in particular, and here next to him was Lady Norton, the wife of Sir Clifford Norton, the latest British Ambassador to Athens. She was ordering new curtains for the threadbare embassy and had a borrowed bomber waiting on the tarmac in Milan.
Opportunities like this did not come twice. Coming charmingly in for the kill, Craxton dropped the name of a mutual friend already working at the embassy in Athens. The deal was sealed. Would he like a lift?


Craxton’s arrival in Greece was much like that of Gerald Durrell, who described his family’s move from Bournemouth to the island of Corfu in 1935, as like stepping out of a black and white film and into colour. Craxton would be less famous over time than his School of London contemporaries, but when it comes to swashbuckling adventure, few bested this Briton abroad. “John Craxton’s paintings in the Mediterranean are full of delight and joy—pleasure in the people and the landscape and the animals,” said his friend David Attenborough. “Joy is somewhat out of fashion these days, but my goodness it’s precious.”
John Craxton: A Life of Gifts is the tale, 21 years in the making, of a brilliant but largely unknown artist for whom life in the moment was more important than art. Ian Collins had not heard Craxton’s name in years and imagined he might already be dead when he found himself pressed up against this “figure of legend” in 2000, at the crowded London memorial service of mutual friend Prunella Clough. “He looked like an old Greek shepherd,” says Collins, “adrift from a flock of goats.”
The pair took a taxi to the French pub in Soho, a haunt of Craxton’s from the early 1940s, forming the cornerstone of a friendship that would last until the artist’s death in November 2009. Collins, a journalist at the time, begged to write his biography but was rebuffed, as had been all others since a disastrous attempt in 1948. “I was writing notes in secret from our first meeting, before finally winning John’s permission—lifting a biographical ban, for me alone, that he had imposed for almost 60 years. The monograph, exhibition books and biography have all flowed from this. The biography’s publication in a beautiful edition by Yale University Press is itself a kind of vindication of John Craxton.”

The fourth of six children, he was born in 1922 to musician Harold Craxton and his wife Essie, dream parents for any artist-to-be. Acomb Lodge, the rambling family home in St John’s Wood, was one of musical London’s great bohemian households, with upright pianos in most rooms and Harold’s pair of concert grands in the teaching studio. An open-door policy saw an endless assortment of what Collins describes as the “musically talented but monetarily challenged” staying for supper, weeks or even years.
The pendulum of an itinerant education swung from cold and strict boarding schools to Betteshanger, a Steiner set-up in an aristocratic country house in Kent. Ill health plagued his childhood—lung X-rays later in life revealed the scars of tuberculosis—although compensation came in the form of extended country stays in Dorset with his aunt and uncle, both painters, exploring secret worlds of art, nature and archaeology.
Craxton met wealthy art collector Peter Watson in April 1940 through one of his family’s musical lodgers. Watson had also fled from Paris to London, launching the influential art and literature magazine Horizon with Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. According to Collins, Watson poured his inheritance into “a collector’s passion for beautiful things and brilliant young men”, and would become over time the ideal friend, patron and occasional lover.
Other players central to the cast included the photographer Joan Eyres Monsell, dance partner on nights out in Soho and the aforementioned mutual friend at the Athens Embassy; Graham Sutherland, who taught Craxton to use his sketchbook and then paint from memory during an escape to the Welsh countryside; EQ Nicholson, artist Ben’s sister-in-law, with whom Craxton would live in a mill house in Dorset after Acomb Lodge was destroyed in the Blitz; and Lucien Freud, his partner in crime throughout the 1940s.

He moved effortlessly between milieus, from sailors and dancing butchers to Stavros Niarchos and the doyennes of Athenian society.

Collins devotes two chapters to Freud, comparing their meeting with that of 19-year old Samuel Palmer and the much older William Blake—both early Craxton influences—a century earlier. “John’s first meeting with Lucien was still more significant, since both raw visionaries were 19… Closer to lovers than brothers, they were spirited twins—although, even at their closest, too individual to be anywhere near identical.” The pair met in London and were quickly united in art and non-conformity as the city was engulfed in the darkness of the Blitz. Sunday lunches with Freud’s parents were followed by a play in grandfather Sigmund’s study, where they took turns lying on the legendary Persian rug-covered couch.
When Watson gave Craxton £50 to pay a year’s rent on an art studio at 14 Abercorn Place, Lucien moved in, the two of them painting together by day and partying in Soho by night. “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,” writes Collins. “The pair became so interwoven that it was unclear whose art was being influenced and how.”


In his 1941 army medical, Craxton was delighted to hear that he’d “be as much use to the war effort as a three-legged horse”. Collins describes his work at the time as evolving rapidly. “The influence of Palmer and Blake was eclipsed by that of Sutherland, Miró and Picasso, and information from the natural world was being transformed by greater distillation.”
He’d already produced his first masterpiece, the self-portrait Poet in Landscape, over the Christmas week in 1941, with another, Dreamer in Landscape, the following week. At his first solo show at the Leicester Galleries in 1944 he sold more than 30 pictures and cleared £300, a veritable fortune at the time. He celebrated over oysters with Watson and bought a Max Ernst for £15 that he would sell two years later to finance the trip to Zurich.
European travel was still not possible when the war ended, so with itchy feet John and Lucien journeyed to the Scilly Isles, an Atlantic archipelago off the coast of Cornwall, in 1945. It proved a turning point in Craxton’s work—a precursor of Aegean light and joy seeping into pictures such as Red and Yellow Landscape. They met the 17-year-old beauty Sonia Leon on the Scillonian ferry but Craxton would not begin Portrait of Sonia until 1948, painting from memory like Graham Sutherland, in Greece.
“He was supremely fortunate, starting with his parents and then ever after, and stupendously talented,” says Collins. “His personal charm and painterly gifts meant that he was able to live his life pretty much as he wished, and to weather many scrapes. When his pictures failed to sell, family and friends helped him. He thrived in Greece in part because, before the era of mass tourism, it was tremendously cheap.”
The Greek Civil War was in full swing when Craxton finally arrived there in 1946. Not that he would have noticed. He wrote to EQ Nicholson: “I can’t tell you how delicious this country is and the lovely hot sun all day and at night tavernas: hot prawns in olive oil and great wine and the soft, sweet smell of Greek pine trees. I shall never come home. How can I?”
Lady Norton provided him with accommodation at the British Embassy, which along with restoring, she was in the process of filling with modern art. Sir Clifford was less pleased with his spontaneous arrival, so he was given a room above the garage, where, with workers below, he began to master the nuances of colloquial Greek.
Although he was adept in charm and conversation—he moved effortlessly between milieus, from sailors and dancing butchers to Stavros Niarchos and the doyennes of Athenian society—he soon offended the ambassador and was sent on his merry way. He continued, though, to receive a £15 monthly allowance from Lady Norton.
Craxton reconnected with Joan Eyres Monsell, who was now living in Athens with Patrick ‘Paddy’ Leigh Fermor. Paddy had taken off on a two-year walking trip from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, in 1933, and met Joan in Cairo the following decade. Considered to be the greatest British travel writer in his lifetime, he based his 1977 book A Time of Gifts—with its Craxton-illustrated cover—on the journey. It was Paddy who suggested to Lady Norton that the out-of-favour Craxton decamp to nearby Poros.
If Craxton had been searching for a style, he most certainly found it on the island of Poros. Lodging with the Mastropetros family in a lovely 19th-century house overlooking the harbour, he realised his first Greek landscape, Hotel by the Sea (1946). Bathed in the brilliant light of the Aegean, the geometry of sea, land and sky is rendered in faceted planes of jewel-like hues and dazzling whites—the antithesis of grey London. A goat foraging on a fig tree honours Pan, the “horny Greek god of shepherds, flocks and wildness”.
He returned to Athens frequently by ferry for embassy parties and his own exhibitions. Lucien joined him in September and remained in Greece for five months. They lodged and worked together while exploring their new surrounds, including a trip by British warship to Hydra as part of a cultural expeditionary force.
However, the friendship slowly began to sour: Lucien claimed John “abandoned” him when more attractive propositions came along; and Craxton, according to Collins, didn’t want to reveal himself completely to the “intense scrutiny and perversity” of Lucien, who was hetero but had made two drunken passes at his friend. They eventually travelled back across the continent to England, with a stop in Paris to catch up with Picasso.
He embarked on a passionate love affair with Margot Fonteyn. It was not to last: Craxton was gay and Fonteyn needed to marry money. But they remained friends and travelled together in fabulously madcap circumstances.
Lucien loved London and Craxton did not, but returning was crucial to his career. In October 1947, they had a joint show at the London Gallery that had been co-owned by Lady Norton in the 1930s. There was also the exhibition, 40 Years of Modern Art, where works by Craxton and Freud were shown alongside those of Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Picasso. A group show followed (Bacon/Freud/Craxton) at the New Burlington Galleries, alongside solo shows and sales to museums and lovers alike.
Craxton was also paid 500 guineas to design sets and costumes for Frederick Ashton’s 1951 ballet Daphnis and Chloe at the Royal Opera House—every penny necessary as he embarked on a passionate love affair with its star, Margot Fonteyn. It was not to last: Craxton was gay and Fonteyn needed to marry money. But they remained friends and travelled together in fabulously madcap circumstances, sailing around Greece with Ashton, Joan, Paddy and a couple of wealthy American benefactors, on a broken-down caïque with lots of champagne and a steward borrowed from the British Embassy.
The ballet, which received lukewarm reviews at the time, was a critical and popular success in retrospect. A 2004 revival to celebrate Ashton’s centenary saw an octogenarian Craxton return to Covent Garden to recreate his designs as conceived a half-century earlier.


A new bond formed with another painter, the Greek artist Nico Ghika, whom Craxton had met at a Christmas party in London in 1945. Watson was considering publishing his work in Horizon and shared photos with his young protégé: “We both immediately recognised an exceptional mind and talent… an artist who had combined the liberating philosophy of Cubism with the landscape of Greece.”
Ghika had inherited a crumbling mansion on Hydra and opened the door to his friends. Having exhausted inspiration in Poros—there was also a lingering accusation that he was a British spy—and having been offered, as Collins puts it, “grand, free and open-ended accommodation on the beguiling island of Hydra”, Craxton moved on.
With the exception of regular stays back in London, the Ghika mansion was his home base throughout the 1950s. He was not the only one enjoying the hospitality: Joan and Paddy also saw the house as home in Greece. The couple lived there for almost two years while Paddy completed Mani, the book’s cover illustrated by Craxton with the eye of divine providence.

There are several Australian connections to these years. From 1955, the literary couple Charmian Clift and George Johnson held court on Hydra. They were Homer’s modern-day “lotus eaters”, leading one Greek magazine to compare the island to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Sidney Nolan and his wife, Cynthia, spent several months at the Ghika house in 1956, where Craxton was impressed by the multitude of drawings scattered across the floor that Nolan used to produce his final picture. There are also the tessellated landscape panoramas, painted from memory once he’d left the island. Landscape, Hydra (1960-62), which Collins believes to be one of Craxton’s finest pictures, today resides at the National Gallery of Victoria.
The fledgling British painter Christopher Mason arrived on the island in April 1960 with the intention of meeting his hero. They were never lovers, but a friendship was struck whereby, in the words of Collins, they “paired with sailors on shared taverna outings”. Seeing his new friend stagnating in the vortex of Hydra, Mason convinced him to move on again, this time to Crete.
Venetian until 1669, Ottoman until 1913 and Greek since, Crete was a world unto itself. Wild, mountainous and beautiful—the birthplace of El Greco, his favourite artist—this was Craxton’s spiritual home. “The Cretans are very independent people and everyone carries a loaded pistol and quite a few sharp knives,” he said, “but despite this apparent wildness they are incredibly kind and honest.” Much of his work was a visual and visceral response to the island: shepherds, the rugged landscape and its wealth of Byzantine frescoes in crumbling mountain churches.
The British art scene had however turned against him. Would he have been a bigger and more successful artist were he straight, or remained in London? “Yes to both questions,” says Collins. “They are both closely connected. There was a homophobic aspect to the recurring claim that he wasn’t serious enough as an artist and clearly having too much of a good time.”
Craxton and Mason moved into a dilapidated section of an old Venetian palazzo overlooking the harbour in the semi-abandoned old town of Chania. Mason soon returned to Paris, but described the interlude as the happiest six months of his life.
Somehow Craxton got the money together to buy the house, where he would live in a state of gilded squalor. He sold a Graham Sutherland painting to foot the £600 purchase price and told his friend Magouche (artist Arshile Gorky’s widow) that she could have a share in the house if she paid £200 for the renovation.
Many years later, Magouche was having lunch with two girlfriends in London when the conversation turned to Greece. She told her friends she had owned a house in Crete for years. “What a coincidence, so have I,” said Joan Leigh Fermor. They burst into laughter when the third friend, Barbara Ghika, said she also owned a house in Crete.
Chania was the right place at the right time for Craxton and kindred spirits—writers, painters, musicians, and a rich American who was probably CIA—with the exotic appeal of a Greek Tangier. The nearby NATO base also suited the artist to a tee. Awakening at the “crack of midday”, he’d work in his studio and afterwards hit the coffee houses with his sketchbook. Then back to the studio, followed by dinner, drinks and dancing with sailors at the taverna long into the night. His energy hardly abated over the years, although the rhythm of life in Chania wasn’t without disruption.
Ongoing accusations of espionage, his constant proximity to soldiers and sailors and rumours of illegal antiquities proved a fatal combination when Greek generals enacted a military coup in 1967. Craxton had to leave, the beginning of a decade adrift. Travels across Europe and North Africa were interspersed with spells at the family home in Hampstead; a stay at Chatsworth with the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire; a trip to the movies, where he met his future civil partner, Richard Riley; and a spell in Edinburgh. “They call it Athens of the North,” he joked, “I call it Inverness of the South.”
“You can live a charmed life if you are charming, and Craxton was charming.”

The Greek regime collapsed when Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974 and within two years Craxton was able to return to Chania. With the exception of the “blitzing of bohemians”, he found it largely unchanged. Collins highlights the return as one of the greatest gifts of Craxton’s life, showing in the renewed vigour in his work. Perfect timing as in the late 1970s, Craxton having been off the scene for years, the art dealer Christopher Hull turned up on his doorstep with a bottle of whisky and a desire to represent him. He produced some of his most beautiful work for Hull, including Still Life with Three Sailors (1980-85), depicting a taverna lunch in wonderfully vibrant palette and structure.
Craxton continued to live in Chania, but as his health failed him he spent more time in London, surrounded by friends and still having fun. British artist Tacita Dean met him on a family holiday to Crete in the early 1980s and had the following to say upon his death: “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.”
From a story originally published in WISH.
John Craxton: A Life of Gifts (2021) by Ian Collins was published by Yale University Press.
Photography: © John Craxton Estate DACS

