William Crozier was born in Glasgow to Irish parents and educated at the Glasgow School of Art between 1949 and 1953. Having travelled to Paris and Dublin, he returned to England in 1956, settling between London and Folkestone where an artistic group formed including the artists William Irvine and John Wright, before he moved to North Essex in 1958. During the 1950s Crozier developed a notorious reputation in the art and literary world, making assemblages and paintings, which were shown at the ICA, the Drian Gallery and the Arthur Tooth and Sons Gallery. Profoundly affected by post-war existentialism, Crozier consciously allied himself and his work with contemporary European art. He was part of the artistic and literary world of 1950s Soho, associating with Robert Colquhoun, Robert Macbryde, John Minton and William Scott, and was part of the expatriate middle-European and Irish intellectual circles in London at the time. Amongst his friends in the art world he counted Eduardo Paolozzi, William Turnbull, Henry Moore and Francis Bacon. Although based between the English countryside and London, Crozier consistently turned towards continental Europe for inspiration and intellectual sustenance. During the 1950s he immersed himself in the Parisian existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and his earliest London exhibitions were in the company of COBRA artists, Karel Appel and Asger Jorn. COBRA artistic interests in experimentation, fantastical beasts and drawing inspiration from children’s drawings, primitive art forms and Dada artists such as Paul Klee, were influences on Crozier’s 1950s work, and beyond.

Essex Landscape (c. 1959) is one of the finest examples of Crozier’s paintings created during his time in Essex in the second half of the 1950s. A work of similar stature is held by the Tate collection. Painted on a monumental scale, Essex Landscape reveals Crozier’s work at its most personal. A profusion of greens overlaid on creamy whites are shot through with stark, thick black outlines and bold streaks of red. Areas of blocked colour are juxtaposed with the central furious energy of the centre of the canvas as streaks as bands and flashes of paint are built up in a dynamic vivid core. The Essex landscape became for Crozier a vehicle for the depiction of unease, anxiety and fear. He defined his approach to painting the landscape in 1958 in the following terms: ‘Painting…is more than seeing…it is seeing with an eye pre-set in peculiar focus, so that the painter is not seeing but reinventing, making the apple or the landscape in the image of his own disappointment or eccentricity.’ The origin of Crozier’s paintings from 1958 onward lay in his encounter with a specific place, and the strength of his reaction to the Essex countryside was the trigger for the emergence of his personal ‘voice’ as an artist. Dark emotions of turmoil and menace seep through Essex Landscape with piercing white circles suggesting a haggard gaze looking from the canvas onto the viewer.

The Essex landscapes are intriguing because they contain in embryonic form some of the recurring elements in Crozier’s mature work: a visceral engagement with a specific place; a desire for the construction of the composition to carry the emotional pitch; and a method of painting directly onto the board or canvas ground. Many of the titles of Crozier’s Essex landscapes suggest desolation, whether in the landscape itself, or the landscape refracted through the artist’s responsibility. ‘I have always felt in a permanent state of exile,’ Crozier explained in one interview, ‘And that’s what my work is about. It’s about a sense of loss, a problem of identity, a longing for a world that perhaps never existed.’ For the artist, who ‘had never lived anywhere quite like that before’, Essex – like West Cork later in his life – felt like living at the end or edge of the world. Its relatively uninhabited estuary landscape with its saltings and wild sea grasses at the edge of marshes, its fields and back lanes lined in summer with white hawthorn blossom, all help to endow parts of the country with a haunting atmosphere of its own, one in which dissolution of identity and a sense of loss and exile are easily comprehensible. “During the day the Essex farmers used to cut about a foot off the sugar beer stalks, and would set fire to remains in the fields at night, because during the day the clouds of smoke blocked the roads. I used to go out at night and see these burning fields, and so the paintings are mainly of these fields burning at night. And it seemed to me symbolic of something.” He has likened this ‘ravaged landscape’ to black and white photographs of First World War battlefields.