The Municipal Art Gallery of Chania is currently running an exhibition devoted to the life and work of John Craxton, the English painter and contemporary of Lucian Freud, who spent the major part of his adult life in Greece, and latterly in a Venetian house at no 1 Moschon on the old harbour in Chania, which he renovated and converted into a studio over a period of some 40 years. The exhibition, celebrating the centenary of his birth, was first shown earlier this year at the Benaki Museum in Athens.

Born on 3rd October 1922 in St John’s Wood, London, John Craxton was one of six children of Harold Craxton, a pianist, composer and professor at the Royal Academy of Music, and Essie Faulkner, a violinist.

Showing an early interest in drawing and painting and little else, he left school without any qualifications, and at the age of 16 a visit to the Pitt-Rivers museum in Dorset inspired in him a love of ancient Greek art, and a longing to live in Greece which was to become the guiding principle of his later life.

Between 1939 and 1941, he studied drawing in Paris and attended two London art schools. He failed an army medical for health reasons, and the war years found him sharing accommodation with his friend and fellow painter Lucian Freud in London. During the same period he also met Joan Raynor – later to marry the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor – who encouraged his interest in Greece. His first solo exhibition was at the Leicester Galleries in London 1944.

His first visit to Greece took place in 1946 and he spent the next few years leading a nomadic life on the Greek islands – Poros, Hydra, Chios, Samos, the Cyclades and the Dodecanese – first visiting Crete in 1947.

During this period he was not only painting and exhibiting in Athens and London, but also designing book covers for Patrick Leigh Fermor, including one for the latter’s translation of The Cretan Runner by George Psychoundakis. Also, in 1951, he designed the sets and costumes for a revival of the ballet “Daphnis and Chloe” choreographed by Frederick Ashton.

In 1961 he moved to the Venetian house on the harbour at Chania which was to remain his home for the next 10 years. Exiled from Greece after the military coup, he returned to Crete in 1976, and remained there until ill health forced his return to Britain in 2006. He died in 2009 at the Royal Free Hospital in north west London.

The exhibition covers all the phases of Craxton’s career, but most notable are the pictures he painted in Crete, full of life and colour. An introductory booklet to the current exhibition, by his biographer Ian Collins, describes the inspiration he derived from Greek culture and from Cretan life in particular:

“He landed in Athens, aged 23, in the spring of 1946, and enduring joy coloured his ensuing pictures. Exploring the Aegean over blissful decades, his senses were completely seduced. He was perfectly alive in each exquisite moment.

“From that moment of ecstatic arrival until his death, virtually every Craxton picture paid homage to the life, light and landscapes of Greece. With much of his work never previously exhibited, he can only now be recognised as an unrivalled portraitist of Greek faces and places from the middle of the 20th century. Just before the advent of mass tourism, he savoured the persistence of myth in rural lives seemingly unchanged since Homeric times. He had many famous friends but preferred to depict ordinary people – shepherds and their families, sailors and soldiers: the company he loved best….

“John Craxton scorned art-world reputations. He never cared to finish his paintings, let alone to sell them. Their message – and paradox – is that he much preferred life to art: Greek life most of all. After his death in a London hospital in 2009, his ashes were scattered in Chania harbour. Now he is part of the picture”

The exhibition, at the Municipal Art Gallery of Chania in Halidon Street, consists of some 100 paintings, prints, photographs and objects mainly from the Craxton Estate, together with another 20 works lent by friends of the artist who live in Chania. It will run until 31st January 2023, after which it will move on to Istanbul and London.

The gallery is open from from 10.00 to 14.00 and 19:00 to 22:00 Monday to Saturday, and is closed on Sundays.