Born into a cultured and well-connected bohemian family in London, the painter John Craxton (1922-2009) yearned from a very early age to live and work in Greece. He achieved his goal, and enduring joy coloured his ensuing pictures – radiant images of a world where myth survived in everyday existence.
In a rented St John’s Wood villa, the Craxton parents ran an open house for the cash-strapped and musically gifted. Space was tight and household budgets always close to breaking, so their six children – John being the fourth of five sons before a desired daughter – were packed off to schools of very mixed quality. When these outposts failed, the siblings were palmed off on relatives and family friends.
John was sent to stay with a godmother on a Lincolnshire farm beside Ermine Street, the Roman road linking London and York. In rare breaks from painting and drawing, he scoured the field edges and found glimpses of antiquity: red-glazed Samian ware pottery and coins bearing the head of Constantine the Great. To encourage this interest in the ancient past, his mother took him to meet Mortimer Wheeler, the director of the London Museum, where her husband and lodgers gave concerts. Wheeler was already famous as a mercurial man of action due to brilliance in the fields of museology, archaeology, and also publicity. In 1930, he and his wife Tessa had begun a dig at the Roman city of Verulamium, in a valley below St Albans, and they swiftly made headlines by uncovering a mosaic pavement with a scallop-shell design. The following July, John was taking the bus each day to help clean mosaics and experience the thrill of discovery. He was eight; the Wheelers’ son, Michael, had been assisting from the age of five.
Excavating Staffordshire