John Craxton R.A.

(British, 1922-2009)

Goatherd and Goat 127 x 104 cm. (50 x 40 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist, by whom gifted as a wedding present to the parents of the current owners in 1961, thence by family descent
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
Chichester, Pallant House Gallery, John Craxton: A Modern Odyssey, 26 March-21 April 2024

Literature
Ian Collins, John Craxton: A Modern Odyssey, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 2023, p.82, fig.76 (col.ill.)

In May 1946 – the first spring after World War Two – John Craxton flew away to Greece. At 23, the London-born nomad found his subject in Aegean life, light and landscapes. That passion would last until his death aged 87.

By 1950 the artist was in his stride: exploring the ancient Greek world of the Eastern Mediterranean; exchanging a semi-Cubist approach in conveying jagged and rugged topography for a singular style taking in everything from mythology and archaeology to Byzantine mosaics. Despite many famous friends, Craxton depicted ordinary people – soldiers, sailors and herder families living close to nature as in Homeric times. If they all possessed a heroic aspect, they also appeared on the point of laughter. In quicksilver drawings and paintings taking ever longer, subject and artist seemed to share a secret joke as well as an all too evident joy in being alive.

Always short of money, Craxton accepted free materials to produce a large painting for a 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition while briefly back in London. Cash prizes were a further lure. While pretending to be toiling in England, he then absconded back to Greece and his current home port of Poros. Drawing on a recent tour of Crete, when he had nearly been shot by a drunken gunman firing wildly while entering a house on a donkey to celebrate a shepherd's wedding, a hedonistic artist began the work which would become Four Figures in a Mountain Landscape (Bristol Museum & Art Gallery). He also completed Goatherd and Goat as the principal study and a stand-alone painting.

Four Figures in a Mountain Landscape is an evocation of sun and shadow. Herders, two in light and two in darkness, lead a flock of goats from shelter in a mountain cave for milking at sunrise. Goatherd and Goat depicts the key foreground figure in the dazzle of dawn.

Cast in the black garb of rural Cretan manhood, and with a traditional scarf lending a piratical look, the figure clasps a billy goat's horn in an image still to be seen across the untamed Mediterranean. But here an everyday encounter meets ancient and mythic themes. Much as Craxton loved goats – admiring their resilience in tough scenery they nibble into desert – there is also a link to the wild bull capture of antiquity and the bull leapers' fresco at the Minoan Palace of Knossos.

Predictably, a happy victim of 'procraxtonation' he missed the Festival of Britain deadline – but for once with a good excuse beyond the pleasures of a social life in the sun. He was asked to design the décor for Frederick Ashton's 1951 Daphnis and Chloe ballet starring Margot Fonteyn, which launched a whole new personal and professional adventure.

In 2011 David Attenborough found Four Figures in a Mountain Landscape in a Bristol City Art Gallery basement during a television documentary. Goatherd and Goat was unseen until the last leg of John Craxton's 2022-2024 centenary tour, taking in Athens, Chania, Istanbul and Chichester.

We are grateful to Ian Collins for compiling this catalogue entry and to Richard Riley for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.