John CRAXTON

Drawn in 1946, the year that John Craxton first came to Greece, this large drawing is closely related to a painting of the same subject by the artist, executed three years later in 1949, which was sold at the auction of the Evill/Frost collection in London in 2011. The same jug or amphora is also found, alongside a potted plant, in a still life drawing of 1946, dedicated by Craxton to Lucian Freud, in the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery (now The Higgins) in Bedford. A comparable still life composition of the same date, drawn on blue paper and depicting a jug and a potted plant by a window, is in a private collection. Common to each of these drawings is a simplicity of design and clarity of draughtsmanship. As Sir David Attenborough has noted of Craxton, ‘Line was, from the beginning, crucially important in his painting. He didn’t care for the smudgings of other styles. He liked to know where an object began and ended. The lines in his early drawings, which he drew with both brush and pen, already had an extraordinary incisiveness and eloquence.’ Characteristic of Craxton’s drawings is his use of conté crayon (a supply of which he had discovered while studying at Goldsmiths) whose effect is here further emphasized in the use of a simple brown packing paper as a support.

Apart from the Evill/Frost canvas of 1949, Craxton depicted this jug or amphora in a handful of other later works. It appears prominently in the painting Galatas of 1947, today in the collection of the British Council, and in a large pencil and gouache drawing of a Water Pot in a Window of the same year, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A related, monochromatic gouache drawing of the same jug, signed and dated 1948, was formerly in the collection of Richard Attenborough and has appeared twice at auction in recent years.