From a dank flatshare with Lucian Freud to the dazzling sun of Crete, the British neo-Romantic blossoms before your very eyes in this irresistible show
Yale, pp.384, 25
Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in its most authentic sense was surely the defining quality of the painter John Craxton, and it flavours this lively and richly coloured account of his life. Ian Collins only met the elderly Craxton by now sporting the moustaches, shepherd’s stick and general demeanour of a Cretan chieftain in the last decade of his life (he lived to 88), and was immediately seduced by his
joie de vivre and his fund of recondite knowledge, stories and jokes, and drawn into Craxton’s charmed circle. He became the artist’s Boswell, taping hours of interviews, working with him towards a monograph on his art and gaining his tacit agreement to a strictly posthumous biography.