John Craxton, Title Unknown, (Blue Chair)
John Leith Craxton RA, was an English painter. He was sometimes called a neo-Romantic artist but he preferred to be known as a “kind of Arcadian”. His first solo exhibition was in London in 1942 at the Swiss Cottage Café, and his first major solo show at the Leicester Galleries in 1944. His work was seen as part of the neo-romantic revival, and his early pre-1945 work shows the influence of Sutherland and Samuel Palmer, and he was also heavily influenced by friend and patron Peter Watson.
He moved permanently to Crete from about 1970, and switched between living in Crete and in London. The writer Richard Olney remembered Craxton in Paris, en route to Greece during the summer of 1951; “Most nights, John Craxton, a young English painter, arrived to share my bed; we kept each other warm. He moved in a bucolic dreamworld, peopled with beautiful Greek goat herders. Soon he left for Greece.“
He was elected Royal Academician in 1993. Craxton lived and worked in both Chania, Crete and London. His love of Crete extended to his being one of the British Honorary Consuls there. In 2006, Craxton and his long-term partner Richard Riley were united in an official Civil Partnership. John Craxton died in 2009 at the age of eighty-seven, survived by his husband Richard.