William Crozier was educated at the Glasgow School of Art (1949-53). After graduating he spent time in Paris and Dublin before settling in London, where he quickly gained great notoriety for his work. By 1961 he was widely regarded as one of the most exciting artists in London. Soho was his habitual haunt with fellow raconteurs William Irvine, Robert MacBryde, Robert Colquhoun, and intermittent comrades Francis Bacon, William Turnbull, and Eduardo Paolozzi. His first solo exhibition was held at the Drian Gallery in 1960, followed by another in 1961, and then three shows in consecutive years from 1962 at Arthur Tooth & Sons. Crozier was profoundly affected by existential philosophy and consciously allied his work with contemporary European art throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including the work of Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Nicolas de Staël. Extended stays in Paris in 1947, 1950, and 1953 were formational experiences: “To be in Paris then was to be at the centre of the world. Anyone who was not young in 1949 and who did not sit in the Café Flore or the Deux Maggots, where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were as gods, simply cannot appreciate the sheer excitement that enveloped the young of Europe emotionally, physically and intellectually.” In 1958, Crozier was lent a cottage in Essex and he subsequently divided his time between there and London. For Crozier the bleak empty estuaries and the wilderness of the marshes of Essex was a ravaged landscape which suggested the torment and fear of the post-war condition. In the introduction to Crozier’s 1961 Drian show, G. M. Butcher wrote, ‘if there is one thing that Crozier wishes to get across in all his painting, it is a mood of fear, anxiety, unease. This is his personal reaction to the world as it is - where savagery is only just beneath the surface.’ The landscape, particularly when seen in the half-light of dusk when form and colour dissolved, became the source of visceral paintings such as Untitled Landscape. Instinctive, animated brush strokes of ochre, moss and sea greens, peacock blue and even black, conveys the primitive energy that Crozier unearthed in Essex. Butcher continued in his introduction from 1961: ‘There is an anxiety in Crozier’s colour harmonies; there is a suspense in the way his shapes and lines hang beneath one another; there is a pictorial ambiguity in colour-areas which may equally read as sea forms, land forms, space forms.’