John Craxton was an English painter of the twentieth century. In 1941 he was rejected from military service, and so he shared a studio with Lucian Freud in London. This was provided by their patron and friend Peter Watson, who was also a figure of immense importance to Craxton's early development. Through Watson, Craxton was able to meet with other artists associated with Neo-romanticism and like many of his generation he was greatly influenced by Graham Sutherland and Samuel Palmer, which is clear from his Poet in a Landscape (1941). By 1943, Craxton had made a marked departure from this style, clear from works such as Welsh Estuary Foreshore. Its reference to the work of Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró placed him in a more European context. He travelled around the Mediterranean after World War II, and in 1960 settled in Crete, where he continued to develop his Romantic pastoral themes. The influence of William Blake gave way to that of Cubism, and he also became interested in Byzantine art. His paintings of Cretan life, such as Vokos II (1984), still reveal a humanist, if not pantheist, philosophy.
A number of his paintings were once owned by David Bowie.
