John Craxton b.1922
Greek Boy with a Sheep, 1949
oil on paper
22 x 16¾ ins
signed lower right 'Craxton'

Provenance
The London Gallery, London
Hill Samuel Bank, London



'I’m at heart a ‘linear’ painter ...I subscribe to that particular Northern predilection for
investing in a visual language with some quality of mystery and enigma'John Craxton once observed of himself and in this atmospheric little study, painted in 1949, the year after he had first gone to live and work in Crete (later to become his permanent home) these qualities are immediately apparent.

Drawing on sources as diverse as Samuel Palmer, Picasso and Byzantine Art, it was through his profound passion for Greece where he 'found human identities, people within their own environment' that he found the means to fuse all these elements into his own distinctively poetic style. It is, at heart, that synthesis between the natural and the imagined which gives to all Craxton’s best work its intense romanticism.