It was on Crete that he learned what he described as a very salutary lesson for a painter – that life is more important than art. Those are his words. And he certainly relished life to the full. He enjoyed riding across Europe between Crete and London on his Triumph Trophy motorcycle. He loved parties, enjoying them in both embassies and village bars with equal gusto. He loved food – particularly eccentric, unusual food. One of my great pleasures in life was to be taken by John to his favourite harbourside restaurant in Chania and be given a dish of boiled sea creatures which even I, who am supposed to have some knowledge of the animal kingdom, found hard to identify.
He had a robust sense of humour and an almost unforgivable taste for puns. He produced a series of linocuts for his Christmas card based on that favourite animal of his – the cat. One showed a cat sitting on a column with the caption “cat-a-pillar”. There were others – which I will leave to your imagination – captioned “cat-astrophe”, “cat-a-pult” and, regrettably, “cat-stration”.
He was intensely musical – not a brilliant executant like his scholarly pianist father Harold, who incidentally gave the first recital in this country of Debussy’s piano music, or his dazzlingly talented oboist sister, Janet. But guided by his instinctive understanding of music, he designed outstandingly successful sets for the Covent Garden ballets Daphnis and Chloë and Apollo. His biographer, Ian Collins, tells how he went to see John in his final illness and found him weeping – not, John explained, because of physical pain, but because of the Shostakovich that was being played in another room.
Those who knew John will, I am sure, have their own particular and much-cherished memories – of his enthusiasms, of his huge laugh, of his generosity and his delight in puncturing pretension. Luckily for all of us, we also have his pictures.
© David Attenborough Productions Ltd.
John Craxton is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (pallant.org.uk) from Oct 28 until Apr 21
