Crucifixion VII is an exuberant painting of Craigie Aitchison’s definitive subject-matter, made in a period of growing maturity and self-confidence. The saturated colours of earth, sky, land and figure are intense, unmodulated and non-naturalistic. The brilliant orange sky leaps forward from the darkened viridian earth, and the purple mountains between them act merely as a structural device in the composition and connote no specific landscape. Aitchison’s disregard for detail was founded on his overriding need for pictorial ‘rightness’: the internal balance of shapes and colours on a flat surface are tuned to a high level so that they appear to exist in a plane beyond reality. The treatment of Christ’s figure on the crucifix is telling – it is painted yellow and the figure is mutilated, its right arm painfully twisted away from the torso and the head hanging down against the chest. In Aitchison’s fantastic landscape, however, the pain of the scenario is salved; wounds are healed even as they are rendered.

Aitchison once said, ‘The Crucifixion is the most horrific story I’ve ever heard, they were all ganging up against one person. As long as the world exists one should attempt to record that.’ Later in life, he would tell a story about how a teacher at the Slade, William Townsend, had discouraged him from painting the crucifixion. Townsend rudely suggested that it was too serious for him. This unfair treatment spurred him to defy his critics and make his first paintings of the subject. Aitchison’s sense of justice is the common theme between these two stories, tying together Gospel truth with his experience of belittlement at the Slade.

Although the injustice and horror of the subject may have captivated Aitchison, however, his treatment of the crucifixion often suppressed a sense of pain or physical suffering. The figure on the cross often appears to glow, unblemished. Aitchison never intended these works as equivalents to the altarpieces of Piero and Fra Angelico that he saw on his visit to Italy in 1955, though he was content, nevertheless, for his works to be used for the same purpose. He contributed four panels to decorate the Chapel of St Margaret, Truro Cathedral, in 1997, for example, and completed an altarpiece commission of Calvary for Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral in 1998.

Along with the crucifixions of Francis Bacon, Aitchison’s Crucifixion VII is purged of morality. (Having trained at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1952 and 1954, Aitchison like his friend Michael Andrews would have been aware of Bacon, who occasionally tutored there and made use of the Slade Professor’s painting studio.) Unlike Bacon, however, an outspoken atheist, Aitchison’s personal beliefs were less clear. When asked by Cate Haste whether he was religious, he responded: ‘I don’t know what it means. I think if you think you’re religious, it’s a bit conceited.’ In a monograph about the artist, Andrew Gibbon Williams wrote that Aitchison ‘is certainly no church-goer, but then again ‘the manse’ is in his blood, and as children he and his brother were regularly taken to churches of various, often opposed, denominations’. Crucifixion VII well summarises these ambiguities in Aitchison’s spiritual life, at once communicating his mixed beliefs and his indulgent, highly-tuned feeling for vibrant colour.

This painting was owned by the artist David Methuen Campbell (d. 2018). He was acquainted with Sandra Blow (to whom he was briefly engaged), Frank Bowling, Rose Hilton and Howard Hodgkin, the latter of whom he knew at Eton where they were taught in the drawing school by Wilfred Blunt.