Craxton was born in London, the son of the composer Harold Craxton. Considered a prodigy as a youngster (he held his first public exhibition at the age of ten), he studied in Paris until the outbreak of war, when he returned to London and attended both the Central School of Art and Goldsmiths. He became friendly with Peter Watson, an influential patron of the arts and subsequently a co-founder of the ICA. Watson introduced him to Lucian Freud and in the mid 1940s Craxton became identified with ‘neo-romanticism’, a wartime tendency involving a heightened and rather graphic response to the English landscape. In 1943, he toured Pembrokeshire with Graham Sutherland , who was then working as an official war artist recording the war effort in the mines of Cornwall and Wales. After the war, Craxton travelled extensively in Europe, visiting Greece in 1946 with Lucian Freud with whom he held a joint exhibition at the London Gallery the following year. Known throughout his life as a neo-Romantic, Craxton himself preferred to be known as an ‘Arcadian’, a nod perhaps to the rather bucolic dreamworld he inhabited, and which peoples his work. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Whitechapel in 1967.

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Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.