John Craxton was born in London in 1922. In 1936 he visited Paris and saw Picasso's Guernica and Miro's The Reaper. By 1939 he lived there and studied life drawing at La Grande Chaumiere. He also studied at Westminster Art School and Central School of Art under P.F. Millard and Eric Schilsky. He embarked on further studies in 1941 at Goldsmiths College under Clive Gardiner, while sharing premises with Lucian Freud. In 1943 he made the first of many visits to Pembrokeshire with Graham Sutherland. Leceister Galleries held his first solo exhibition in 1944. Beginning with a trip in 1948 to Crete, he travelled widely over the next few years, living abroad for periods of time but always maintaining a studio in London. A retrospective was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1967.