John Craxton R.A. (British, 1922-2009) Summer Triptych (Boy on Wall, Girl on the Seashore, Goat ...

John Craxton R.A. (British, 1922-2009) Summer Triptych (Boy on Wall, Girl on the Seashore, Goat and Tree) tempera on board 142 x 60.5 cm. (55 7/8 x 23 5/8 in.); 142.3 x 59.7 cm. (56 x 23 1/2 in.); 142.8 x 60.4 cm. (56 1/4 x 23 3/4 in.) Painted circa 1958 Footnotes: Provenance The Artist, from whom acquired directly by the present owner Private Collection, Greece In 1958 John Craxton painted panoramic Summer and Winter cartoons in tempera for a mural competition at London's Morley College. They featured motifs obsessing him over more than a decade of Greek explorations – boy on a wall, girl with a scarf and stretching goat perhaps the most compelling. He narrowly lost the contest; but, wasting nothing in art and life, he worked the three keynote images into several stand-alone paintings, and united them in this triptych. The two cartoons are now reunited at Nuffield College Oxford. From Craxton's arrival in Athens in Spring 1946 when he was 23, until his death at the age of 87, almost all of his lightening and brightening pictures derived from Aegean themes. Evoked in wanderings around Greece and the wider Hellenic world of the Eastern Mediterranean, his work was a modernist response to mythology, archaeology and historic art (Byzantine mosaics, El Greco, Ottoman architecture). Rejecting all frontiers in art and life – 'all I care about is cross-pollination' - he called himself 'a kind of Arcadian'. After dark war-time introspection which made him a poster-boy for the Neo-Romantic movement (a label he especially hated), he became a portraitist of other people in Greece. The boy on a seawall was seen on Poros – the artist's first Greek island, where Lucian Freud joined him for five fertile months. The girl with the scarf was Maria Mastropetros - part of the family Craxton lodged with for years on Poros. She was sketched dressing on the beach after a swim. The image was in the artist's mind when he returned to London to design Frederick Ashton's 1951 Daphnis and Chloë Ballet for Covent Garden. He took with him studies of dancing sailors, whose taverna steps were worked into the choreography. Maria with her scarf inspired a solo for the star of the ballet – Margot Fonteyn. For all his love of people, the first living thing Craxton painted on Poros was a goat nibbling a foreground tree in Hotel by the Sea (Tate Collection, London). He loved the link to Pan, and the tension lent to a scene – goats enduring harsh terrain while eating it into desert. John Craxton became a consummate portraitist of goats. Before a 1948 trip to Crete, the island where he would settle from 1960, he sent a postcard back to an England which, even then, was no longer home. With no care for punctuation or spelling, he expressed the joy of his life and art: 'Im off again in a day to an island where lemons grow & oranges melt in the mouth & goats snatch the last fig leaves off small trees the corn is yellow and russles & the sea is harplike on volcanic shores saw the marx brothers in an open air cinema & the walls were made of honeysuckle.' John Craxton's centenary touring exhibition is at Mesher Istanbul until 23 July and then at Pallant House in Chichester from 28 October. John Craxton: A Life of Gifts by Ian Collins is now a Yale paperback. We are grateful to Ian Collins for compiling this catalogue entry. This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: * AR * VAT on imported items at a preferential rate of 5% on Hammer Price and the prevailing rate on Buyer's Premium. AR Goods subject to Artists Resale Right Additional Premium. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com