Craigie 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, Aitchison 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 Biblical narrative with his personal experience as an art student.

Although the injustice and horror of the subject may have captivated Aitchison, however, his treatment of the Crucifixion suppressed any sense of pain or suffering. The figure on the cross often appears to glow. In Crucifixion, a bright green bird on the cross bar of the crucifix offers consolation to the mournful figure. A dog of uncertain breed crouches at the foot of the cross in sympathy. (Aitchison loved animals and kept many Bedlington terriers, who often appeared in his paintings.) On the other side of the cross, a short green branch provides compositional balance. The figure of Christ is painted brown, which harmonises with the yellow ground. Besides his many depictions of the Crucifixion, some of the most original imagery in Aitchison’s oeuvre was portraiture of Black sitters silhouetted against brilliantly colourful, monotone backgrounds. He made his first Crucifixion paintings with a Black Christ in the mid-eighties; of the two earliest examples, both completed in 1986, one was a large canvas purchased by Birmingham Museums Trust in 1999.

Aitchison most often painted Christ as a figure with white skin, but on several more occasions over the following decades he again painted Christ with a darker skin tone. Besides this work, completed in 1997, two others—both with yellow grounds—were Crucifixion IV (1988, Private Collection) and Crucifixion, Blue and Yellow, Montecastelli (2004, Private Collection). Owing to the schematic quality of Aitchison’s Crucifixion imagery, whereby the figure is often unnaturalistic and contorted, often with both arms omitted altogether as in this painting, the skin colour of the figure might also be considered as an arbitrary visual quality dictated by the internal, formal demands of the picture, especially the colour scheme. In the case of one Crucifixion, painted in 1967–68, the figure of Christ was a brilliant yellow that harmonised with the orange, green and purple hue of the surroundings.

Aitchison never intended his Crucifixion paintings as equivalents to the altarpieces of Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico that he admired on an early, formative visit to Italy in 1955. He was happy, nevertheless, for his works to be used in a devotional setting. 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. Aitchison had a rich and varied Christian background, which informed his serial treatment of the Crucifixion. When asked by Cate Haste if 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’. In any case, Aitchison on occasion gave certain works the title ‘Religious Painting’, and his Crucifixions are not merely formal exercises. They respond to the long and complex history of the Crucifixion in art, and they register the artist’s personal interest in the Biblical narrative from which the iconography arose.