You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. Today I'm talking to Rosemary Hill, a contributing editor at the LRB, whose most recent book is Times Witness, History in the Age of Romanticism. She has a piece in the current issue of the LRB on the 20th century British painter John Craxton.

It's a review of a new biography of Craxton by Ian Collins.

Hello Rosemary, thank you for joining me.

Hello.

John Craxton, to the extent he's thought about at all, is now seen as a peripheral figure in 20th century British art.

And of all the artists you mentioned in

your piece, he's possibly the least famous. But that wouldn't have been predictable in 1944,

say, would it? As a young painter full of promise, did he seem destined for greatness?

Well, he was part of that generation that came up with Lucian Freud, who was his exact

contemporary and also a younger contemporary of Graham Sutherland. And he was seen very much

in that way as part of the, particularly in the post-war period, because he really launched

himself during the war. He couldn't fight.

He escaped conscription because he was just too kind of thin and ill-looking.

The army took one look and said, no, thank you.

And by the time the war ended, and everyone, of course, was looking for new starts and new hope,

he was very much part of what post-war art was going to be with the others,

with Moore and Hepworth. And yet now, as you say, he has been very largely forgotten,

which is why I think Collins's biography is such a welcome arrival. And he was classified as a

neo-romantic.

Well, that was the real, I have to say, having always liked Craxton's work, when I came to

this book, I did very much have him in my mind as part of the neo-romantics.

Minton, Ayrton, Craxton, they all were bracketed together. They still are really bracketed together in English art history as it is written as part of the post-war near romanticism, this idea that one way of getting over the horrors of the war was to return to an English pastoral tradition, the tradition of Blake and Samuel Palmer, and

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