William Crozier was educated at the Glasgow School of Art (1949-53). On graduating he spent time in Paris and Dublin before settling in London, where he quickly gained great notoriety for his work. A year after his first show with John Wright and William Irvine at the Parton Gallery, Soho, in 1957, Crozier found a studio in the village of Pebmarsh, North Essex. Essex inspired his paintings of dark dramatic landscapes which he was invited to show first at the Drian Gallery, then shortly followed by Arthur Tooth & Sons with whom he had his first solo show in 1960. In 1963 he spent a pivotal year in southern Spain with the Irish poet Anthony Cronin and the following year the Arts Council included his paintings in the exhibition Six Young Painters with David Hockney and Bridget Riley among others. Crozier taught at the Bath Academy of Art, the Central School of Art and Design, the Studio School in New York and finally at Winchester School of Art. In 1973 he became an Irish citizen, having been born to Irish parents, and lived between homes in West Cork and Hampshire. In 1991 the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork and the Royal Hibernian Academy, of which he was an honorary member, curated a retrospective of his work. Crozier was awarded the Premio Lissone in Milan and the Oireachtas Gold medal for Painting in Dublin in 1994. A major retrospective was held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin from October 2017 – April 2018. The years between 1963 and 1969 represent a period of relative stylistic calm in Crozier’s career, after his time in Spain and before his visits to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the eruption of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Road to Chartres II stands out as a pure landscape in this period dominated by what the artist described as figurative scenes of ‘torment and isolation’. The road itself is represented by the curving band of blue to the left of the canvas. Churned earth shows blood red and another band of greenish-blue rises with organic energy, part cloud, part tree. A slender rainbow rises in the distance. Although a figure is absent in Road to Chartres II, a human presence is implied through an atmosphere of anxiety and emotional torpor. It suggests a subjectively registered expressive state and recalls Edvard Munch’s similarly distorted and vividly coloured work. The notion of the painting as a felt, first-person perspective is reinforced in the context of Croizer’s statement from 1970 that “it is Man’s isolation which interests me”. Rather than observing a human figure laid bare and dejected, here Crozier makes the viewer inhabit that figure’s world, walking the road of pilgrimage and introspection in their shoes. Road to Chartres is a remarkably early instance of a rainbow in Crozier’s work. Already, as in other major works such as Rainbow’s End (1970) and Portrait for José Guadalupe Posada (1975), it is a deeply equivocal symbol. Like Constable’s rainbow over Salisbury Cathedral, which Crozier would have seen in the National Gallery, it ‘seems not to herald the advent of sunshine, but to bend itself back and prepare for the assault of fresh storms’, an evocation of embattled religious faith translated from Constable’s context of religious reform to Croizer’s existential environment. (Anthony Lane in Julia Marciari Alexander and David Scrase, eds., Howard Hodgkin: Paintings, 1992-2007, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007) p.63-4) Ultimately, Crozier’s weather is emotional rather than meteorological; his rainbow is not simply the cheery or sentimental symbol as dictated by convention but rather an equivocal messenger of optimism and resilience, asserting the artist’s masterly control of expressive colour. Less interested in pots of gold than a rich emotional bond between artist and viewer, Crozier’s rainbow preempts his later wish for his ‘paintings to be disciplined in their order, rooted in their tradition and also sensuous, sexual, self-confident in their beauty, optimistic, aristocratic and smiling.’ (Crozier Quoted in the press release for exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 11 August-6 September 1985)