This work is one of several in the exhibition that is inspired by pastoral images of harvesters by nineteenth century artists Samuel Palmer and William Blake. As this is 1945, the harvesters are not boys from the villages but prisoners of war or demobbed servicemen.

Minton was the only one of our three artists who saw active service. His application as a conscientious objector was rejected and he spent two years with the Pioneer Corps before being sent home from the front due to what now appears to have been a nervous breakdown.

After the war Minton was known as the life and soul of the Soho art scene where he spent time in jazz clubs and bars with friends like Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon.

The Neo-Romantics were hugely influenced by the work of the Victorian artist Samuel Palmer (1805–1881). Palmer, whose work was not appreciated in his own lifetime, had been rediscovered in the 1920s. His visionary and spiritual landscapes had a profound impact on the young artists.
‘You might say my work is ‘escapist’ art and, somehow, it became an antidote to the war in the same way that Palmer’s was an antidote to his times’ John Craxton.

Craxton first saw Palmers work in 'Horizon' a literary magazine published by his patron the art collector Peter Watson. Watson was to be incredibly generous in helping a new generation of young gay artist’s further their careers. For Craxton he paid for a studio shared with Lucian Freud, published his work and introduced him to Graham Sutherland.

Watson arranged for Craxton to join Sutherland in Pembrokeshire where this work was made. Sutherland encouraged the young artist, ‘It’s important to invent. Take a section of the landscape and try to evoke the wider place.’ This drawing is of an estuary Craxton had seen in a painting of Sutherland’s a couple of years earlier. He asked to be shown where is was and made several drawings of it.

War made it harder for our young artists to see art. The National Gallery moved their collection to a Welsh Mine for safety, only bringing back one painting a month. Kenneth Clark, the galleries director instead, filled the walls with work by current artists such as Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and John Piper. This older generation of Neo-Romantics had all been given commissions as Official War Artists and were a huge influence on our three.

They could also see modern work in new magazines such John Lehmann’s ‘The Penguin New Writing’ and Peter Watson’s ‘Horizon’. It was in ‘Horizon’ that Craxton saw Sutherland’s ‘Association of Oaks’ for the first time the study of which you can see here on the left.

In the 1940s Minton and Vaughan became close friends. They would meet up at Peter Watson’s flat and go drinking in Soho with fellow gay Neo-Romantic artists Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde.

Both were conscientious objectors though only Vaughan’s application was accepted; he was sent to Wiltshire in the Non-Combatant Corps. Ashton Gifford House was close to where he was stationed and he spent a summer on the estate clearing the gardens and neighbouring woodlands.

In the summer of 1939 Vaughan spent his weekends at Pagham in Sussex sunbathing and swimming. He took photographs of his friends sometimes posed sometimes at play, naked or near naked. Vaughan had learnt how to develop his own photographs a few years before which meant the risk of his photographs exposing his sexuality was reduced.

He used the photographs as inspiration for his work throughout his career. This work painted in 1950 was based on one where his friends were throwing seaweed at one another, though here the seaweed is replaced as a stone that the man throws into the sea. The figures also show the influence of Cezanne’s bathers which can also be seen in the exhibition.

Craxton was the only one of our artists to make it past his sixties. He had always been the least well of the three: a diagnosis of pleurisy led to an army recruitment officer explaining ‘he would be as much use to the war effort as a three-legged horse’.

When the war ended he visited Greece, and eventually moved to the island of Crete where he found his own pastoral idyll. His melancholic war images gave way to joyful pictures filled with light and colour.