"The goatishness of John’s goats would be very difficult to put on a picture", says a rather bemused David Attenborough when I met him on Monday evening at the Fitzwilliam Museum. "Similarly the quality of the light, I don’t know any photograph that could convey the quality of the Mediterranean sun." There remains a special place for art in the depiction of the natural world, and Attenborough recognises and admires this in John Craxton’s works. "It’s a joy to see them" he declares warmly.

After all it’s not just any old artist that draws in a guest like Sir David Attenborough to the Fitzwilliam Museum to open an exhibition; the artist was also an old friend, and this collection comes as the most comprehensive and biggest collection of Craxton’s painting since 1967 with a total of seventy pieces spanning the entirety of Craxton’s life. Ian Collins, another personal friend and the co-curator, notes that it’s "particularly appropriate" for the largest retrospect of Craxton’s work to be exhibited at the Fitzwilliam as it was "John’s favourite British museum". It seems that it's an affection that Attenborough shares: "As an undergraduate I was bewitched by an art gallery that was sufficiently civilized to have rugs in the middle of the gallery, this is the kind of civilized ambiance that warms the cockles of the heart, it’s a marvellous museum and Cambridge is lucky to have it".

John was his friend for about forty years, but Attenborough first knew him through his art. "I was captivated" he says when recalling his first experience of witnessing Craxton’s work, and it’s easy to see why. Looking around, the development from the dark line drawings of ‘angst’ filled juvenilia to the iridescent sun that shines from the canvases of the Mediterranean seems practically impossible. Standing at the entrance to the exhibit looking at both the start and end of Craxton’s career it’s striking how much and how little has changed within the artist’s work. 

The opening sign describes his education as "spasmodic" but it’s hardly what this ordered exhibition room offers. Ian Collins and curator David Scrase present a retrospective that spans a lifetime, beginning with the depths of dark teenage rejection and moving to the sun streaked freedom of the Mediterranean with artistic constraints thrown aside. Attenborough sees the progression all to clearly: "Looking at them in a coarse way there’s a preliminary section which happened at the end of the war...and you can see a certain amount of angst in those pictures and they were called ‘neo-romantic’, and John hated labels and he didn’t like that one, but you can see what people were going on about."

He notes the move from England as being instrumental to Craxton’s development: "There is a profound change, suddenly from this worried introspective, repressed feeling you get in those pictures...you suddenly get this burst of Mediterranean light, the champagne thrill, the rock with sunlight bouncing off and there it is!"

You may wonder how you haven’t heard of Craxton before, and it’s part of this habit for living that hindered his public recognition. After all he started off with all the right connections. As a student he was close friends with Lucien Freud, Attenborough recalling how they even "shared a studio, and they often signed one another’s drawings just to say ‘that’ll teach the critics’". But then John discovered the Mediterranean. The move away meant that he, unlike Freud, "turned his back on the art world and simply painted, and didn’t care. He was a great enjoyer, he loved life, he loved Crete, he loved painting and the other bits didn’t mean so much to him. So it was not until he reached his 60s he suddenly began to think, as many of us do, what have I been doing with my life and do people know about it? Of course he was too modest a man to beat his chest, but I‘m quite sure he was delighted when people knew what he did and he would have I’m sure been thrilled to see this. I’m thrilled to see it because this is the most comprehensive survey of his work so far."

Craxton’s self-named tendency for ‘procraxtonation’ was also key in preventing a consistent outflow of work, and many of the paintings took several years to complete, not because the craftsmanship was particularly laborious, as many might expect from the vast scale of some of the paintings, but because Craxton was simply too absorbed in living to record life. When asked to describe Craxton, Attenborough launches into a list of adjectives: "Unassuming, scapeless, funny, modest, wildly entertaining, I mean you had a terrific time if John was around...you had a good time".  It’s something many will be able to identify with, Craxton a poster boy for heralding the creative lifestyle in all its forms.

He certainly looks the part, the personal photographs that subtly intersect the larger pieces highlight that art was often something Craxton was making as much off as on the canvas: wild partying depicted in paintings becomes highlighted as echoes of reality in small black and white photographs, life and art wonderfully intermingled.

This is a stunning exhibition from an artist that deserves much wider public recognition, I urge you to see it.