WCXX

As this survey makes clear, by the age of 25 Craxton's artistic identity had matured. With his style, subject matter and working method all fully formed, it is hard to imagine how he would have developed had he remained in England after the war. My guess is he'd have responded badly to market forces and critical pressure to do new things. What he needed was to develop at his own pace - even if at times that meant standing still. But to do that he had to leave the country.

On his first visit to Greece in 1946, Craxton was swept away by the light, colour, landscape, food, and people. The dark cloud that hung over the work he did in England lifts and overnight his palette changes to clear blue, green and white. The new pictures look so different from the old that it is easy to overlook the seamless continuity between them and the imagery of the neo-romantic period.

Gone are his melancholy self-portraits in the guise of a shepherd or poet - and in their place we find real shepherds (or rather goatherds) tending living animals. Now Craxton is painting a world outside himself, not one that existed largely in his imagination. Goats, fish, cats, or a frieze of sailors dancing on the edge of the sea: in the Greek paintings beautiful creatures move naturally across bare rocks and blue waters. The compressed joy you find in these pictures doesn't exist elsewhere in British post-war art.

With a few interruptions Craxton would spend the rest of his life in Crete.

And though he would paint large-scale murals and design stage sets and tapestries, neither his subject matter nor his style changed in any fundamental way during that period. It may sound harsh, but when he decided to live permanently in Greece, he elected to write himself out of the history of art. But if there is little exploration or discovery in Craxton's later work, you find instead a sense of fullness and completion, a feeling that in accepting his limitations, he remained true to himself.

As he once said, 'I can work best in an atmosphere where life is considered more important than art then I find its possible to feel a real person — real people, real elements, real windows — real sun above all. In a life of reality my imagination really works. I feel like an émigré in London and squashed FLAT.' It was not only London that oppressed his spirit, I think, but overwhelming power of the new art being made in Paris by Picasso, Miro and Leger. In assessing Craxton's work, you have to accept his debt to these artists, and particularly Picasso. It's most noticeable in the works on canvas, especially in formal portraits like his 1946 'Girl with a Cock' and its there too in the faceted geometric planes of Greek landscapes like his panoramic view of Hydra of 1960-61.

For the most part these borrowings amount to no more than a form of stylisation, although at times — as in 'Still Life with Cat and Child' from 1959 - they amount to pastiche. But in his informal conté pencil sketches of a Cretan shepherd or priest, the line comes alive and the encounter becomes a vivid record of his brief and often intense encounter with a real person.

Craxton continued to exhibit in London at the Royal Academy through the 1990s. When I used to review the summer show, I well remember how every year I'd step into a large gallery, hung floor to ceiling with paintings entitled 'Venice: the Grand Canal' or 'Interior W11', and out of the visual cacophony a single picture would leap off the wall. It was always by John Craxton.

He wasn't an artist of the first rank but he was inimitable. This show is just the right scale and it comes with a beautifully illustrated book about his life and work by his friend Ian Collins.