Dennis Creffield: Art and Life

Hugely admired by artists and writers from Henri Cartier Bresson to the Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson, the extraordinary life and work of painter Dennis Creffield (1931-2018) are explored in this, the first major monograph on the artist.

The narrative traces the artist’s ‘Dickensian’ upbringing, his formative experiences as a teenager under the tutelage of David Bomberg, his conversion to Catholicism and his award-winning years at the Slade. Focus is given to Creffield’s passions for the stories of England, not only in the Cathedral drawings, but in his expressive work on Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, on Blake and in his paintings and drawings of London, the great Petworth House, Cornish tin mines and the eerie military buildings on Orford Ness.

Complementing his work on England’s sacred and profane identity is an equally audacious body of work on the human body, from tender paintings of mother and child to erotic paintings of women to his late paintings of men near death – Turner, Nelson and Rimbaud. To quote his fellow artist R.B. Kitaj, Creffield’s cover has been ‘well and truly blown.’