“HE LEFT ME FOR A BETTER PAINTER”.

John Craxton, Landscape with Rocks, 1942, courtesy of Osborne Samuel.

Lucian Freud and John Craxton met at art college in 1941 when they were 19 years old, and they were soon living together, painting together, and drinking together, enjoying what there was to enjoy in wartime London, both exempt from military service.

They became inseparable, in the way that only very young men can, as they found their way in the art world. And when they were separated for any length of time, they wrote to one another, using a succession of nicknames, inventing playful neologisms, and drawing sketches between the lines and in the margins of whatever paper they could lay their hands on.

Their friendship – and it was a friendship, they were never lovers – lasted until the end of the decade, when Freud met Francis Bacon, with whom he developed a similarly close relationship. The sort of relationship where three’s a crowd: he dropped Craxton like a stone.

Craxton was deeply hurt, but he kept all Freud’s correspondence, and this remarkable exhibition at Osborne Samuel displays dozens of letters and postcards, addressed not to ‘Dear John’ but to ‘Spag’, ‘Crapinix’, ‘Sister’, ‘Crag’, ‘Cragstren’, ‘Spagonee’ and various other pet names. Freud writes about his life as a young painter finding his feet on the art scene, and discovering a world outside the confines of war-blighted London, as he starts to travel further afield.

This is Freud’s centenary year, of course, but it is also Craxton’s, and the exhibition is completed with a handful of paintings, etchings and drawings by the lesser-known artist, during the period of their intense friendship, when their reputations were still on a par. Craxton lacked Freud’s intense focus, and while he continued to be a feted painter for the rest of his days (lived for the most part in Greece) he never quite fulfilled his early promise.

He did, however, have a tremendous time, hanging out with the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, the Greek painter Ghika, and numerous sailors he chatted up in Cretan tavernas. But that’s another story, best told in Ian Collins’ fine biography A Life of Gifts. 

Lucian Freud: Illustrated Letters to John Craxton, until December 16, Osborne Samuel, London.