He was louche, larger than life, a lover of all things Hellenic and in his early years on the London art scene inseparable from the equally rakish Lucian Freud. For decades John Craxton, viewed as a giant in the pantheon of painters of modern Greece, an unrivalled portraitist of the country he would come to adopt, languished in relative obscurity. What the sun did for him in conveying joy in colour, the arbiters of taste in the art world of the grey of England preferred to ignore. But a series of retrospectives in Athens, his beloved Chania – the Venetian...