Grove Koger

Not so long ago, buyers expected to discard a book’s dust jacket as soon as they got the book home. The jacket itself carried the book’s title and author and that was about it. The book itself would probably be plainly bound, or the buyer might buy the book’s cut and stacked pages—the “text block”—and turn them over to an artisan who would bind them to the buyer’s specifications. In time, however, publishers realized that wrapping a book in an attractive dust jacket would attract more buyers, leading them to commission artists to design suitable images for the jackets. Ideally, image and text create a unit greater than the sum of the parts.

So it was in the case of John Craxton and Patrick Leigh Fermor, two masters of their arts.

According to Artemis Cooper’s 2012 biography of the latter, it was Noel Evelyn, the wife of Sir Clifford Norton, who introduced painter John Craxton to Greece. Sir Clifford was Britain’s ambassador to Greece in the immediate post-war years, and his wife was a discerning collector of contemporary art, hence her acquaintance with Craxton. The artist went on to meet Fermor and Fermor’s future wife, Joan, a few years later in Athens, and the three renewed their acquaintance in 1961 in the northern Greek town of Metsovo at the residence of Foreign Minister Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza. (Ian Collins published a biography of Craxton himself in 2021, but I don’t have ready access to it.)

Craxton, whose neo-romantic works reflected the influence of the great English artist Graham Sutherland, had created four “decorations” for the Queen Anne Press’s edition of Fermor’s Time to Keep Silence (1957), a short account of visits to several European monasteries. For his next book, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese (1958), Fermor signed a contract with publisher John Murray, and he was so taken the cover Craxton painted for it that he insisted that every book of his that Murray published would carry a cover by Craxton.

The artist went on to design the covers for Fermor’s next book, Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece (1966), as well as the now-famous Time of Gifts (1977) and its sequel, Between the Woods and the Water (1986), which recounted segments of his epic trek across Europe in the early 1930s. Cooper reports that Fermor wasn’t happy with the cover for this last volume, feeling that Craxton’s depiction of him on horseback was clichéd and didn’t look at all like him, but Murray stuck with the design anyway. (For what it’s worth, I think Fermor may have been right, but the painting suggests the expansive and celebratory character of the book just the same.)

The Fermors had settled in the remote village of Kardamyli in the Mani Peninsula in the mid-1960s. In the meantime, Craxton himself had fallen in love with Greece, and in 1970 began spending part of each year on the island of Crete. Although I don’t care for his portraits, most of which strike me as coy, his landscapes are outstanding and capture the character of his adopted home better than any other representations I’ve seen. Particularly striking is his painting Landscape, Hydra, a detail of which appears on the book cover below.

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