John Craxton, R.A. (1922-2009)

In the case of Peter Watson's relationship with Craxton, the friendship between patron and artist went much deeper and lasted much longer than his relationship with Freud. Watson did a great deal to support the young artist and Craxton repaid him by tending Watson's reputation as best he could for the rest of his long life, explaining to everyone who would listen how central Watson had been to the cultural life of London. Examples of Watson's help to Craxton are everywhere: he introduced him to John Piper; he paid for a trip to South Wales with Sutherland; he commissioned and paid for Geoffrey Grigson to write the first book on Craxton, which appeared in 1948; and he bought a number of Craxton's pictures. The many letters between them attest to their closeness. One of the highlights of the recent Craxton retrospective at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge was the large picture called Pastoral for Peter Watson. from 1948 and now in the Tate. The portrait drawing here was done during the War when Watson and Craxton were staying at a house called Tickerage Mill in Sussex, which belonged to Watson's friend, the artist and bon viveur, Dick Wyndham.

In 1956 Watson's patronage of the cultural scene came to a shuddering halt when he was found dead in his bath in suspicious circumstances at the age of 47. Freud's and Craxton's reputations were by then set in their different ways, beneficiaries of a type of patronage familiar from earlier days, but largely extinct by the mid-Twentieth Century.

(Adrian Clark, private correspondence, 2 May 2014).

A biography of Peter Watson by Adrian Clark and Jeremy Dronfield will be published by John Blake Publishing in 2015.