John Craxton is an inspiration

I was, in a sense, his pupil. In my last year at school I was asked by my Latin master to paint a mural in the Classics Room, and Craxton, releasing me from the irksome correctitude of drawing and perspective, allowing triangular veils of colour to translate landscape and figures into Virgilian unreality, was my inspiration and my mould. I did not then know that he was only in his late twenties, less than a decade my elder, and thought him, with his exhibitions, book illustrations and a monograph by Geoffrey Grigson, as old and as eminent as Michelangelo.

Early in 1967 the Whitechapel Gallery, with Bryan Robertson its driving director, gave him a retrospective exhibition. He too had been early aware of John's work and wrote of its "vigour, astringency and brilliance ... the crisp, clean vitality of its design ... those qualities of clarity, incisiveness and abstraction ... the use of line has a special authority and eloquence". I quote at length because, as so often with Robertson, I have neither better words nor wiser observations; I sense too that we shared a certain melancholy, feeling that John, at 44, was in a rut and that he must very soon reach further than his elegant, exquisite, intelligent and discreet, but contrived, commingling of Picasso with Blake, Miró with Sutherland, Palmer and Nash with those inadequate but influential rogues Colquhoun and MacBryde.

Alas, only in turning to tempera and lightening his colour (often to the point of prettiness) and in imposing on his paintings patterns that were in essence the stylisation of fundamental drawing did he change; his subjects remained resolutely figurative at a time when the strongest market for contemporary art was resolutely abstract but in no aesthetic dimension did they grow. John's reputation began to fade and for the next two decades he virtually disappeared. He lived in Crete, losing touch with the London scene, and his established dealers, the important and reputable Leicester Galleries, themselves falling into terminal desuetude, were content to drop him. His habit of work became dilatory, contemplation and industry banished by neglect, and sometimes he did not paint at all.

It was Christopher Hull, a sensibilitous dealer in Belgravia, who resurrected him in 1982 and loyally promoted him, and it was through Christopher that John at last became a friend when I bought his portrait drawing of Lucian Freud.

Now there's a tale to tell that has not been told in full. Young John and Lucian, both 20, shared a maisonette in St John's Wood for two years from 1942 — "We lived and painted happily ... we were inseparable ... like brothers ... I learned close scrutiny from Lucian, and Lucian learned to draw, plan pictures and understand what can be done with colour." There were moments in these early years when their work came very close, the affinities undeniable. Then, John seemed the more promising: his first one-man show was at the Leicester Galleries in 1944, his first commission came the same year; but his friendship with Lucian remained firm — and of this the evidence is my affectionate portrait drawing, executed in Poros in October 1946, and in their joint exhibition at the London Gallery in 1947. It is a period that the powerful Freud camp now pooh-poohs, dismissing Craxton with spiteful denigration as precious, modish "and for a time successful" — Freud eventually damned him as a copyist. They exchanged drawings; Freud quickly sold his Craxtons to settle gambling debts — "You don't mind, do you?" he said to John after the event, but, much later, when Craxton needed to sell his Freuds, his old friend is reported to have impugned their authenticity by writing on them "Craxton is a c**t".

Other whispers confront the biographers of both men. They lived together (though John was later to describe it as "sharing premises"), were students together at Goldsmiths, travelled together to the Scillies and St Ives in 1945, and were together for months on Poros in the winter of 1946-47; their drifting apart seems to have come about soon after 1947 but their bad terms developed only much later. John was queer — his word for it (and for most men of his generation) — and contented with his lot; Freud's early work suggests a broad range of sexual curiosity and his general behaviour led to his being likened to decadent young Rimbaud; both (Freud far more greedily than Craxton) willingly accepted the patronage, cash and social introductions of Peter Watson, co-founder of the ICA and wealthy homosexual sponsor of Bacon, Colquhoun, MacBryde, Vaughan, Minton and other homosexual painters.

Craxton remained a bachelor; Freud, on the other hand, has fathered at least eight children.

As for their subsequent rupture, I have a letter from John, written early last year, in which the rage against Freud and his claque, quite undiminished, is clear evidence of lasting hurt.

I fancy, however, that in the months of his dying all recollections of Freud were replaced by thoughts of finer things — of Cretan sunlight, of the great music that all his life had played about him, and perhaps of the oysters that were for him ambrosia.