His earliest cityscapes were massy, brooding London scenes, painted from the roof of Christopher Wren’s Royal Observatory in Greenwich – one early work was praised by the influential critic David Sylvester as the ‘most impressive’ on show at an exhibition in 1959, with ‘the restless shapes of the jagged brush-strokes settl[ing] down into a clear precise luminous structure.’ But he later ranged to a rather different vantage point on Englishness – the industrial north, under continual construction, which he painted from the roof of Leeds University. His move to Brighton – ‘this skittish, singing town’ as he called it – freed up his palette, pushed him closer (but never entirely) to abstraction, and allowed him to reconcile his love of the cityscape with his interest in the sensuous life; Brighton was, he explained, ‘a fine, seedy, romantic place to dwell’. But he continued also to engage with the spiritual, especially in his remarkable series of landscapes from the Holy Land from the 1990s.

Later commissions – to paint Petworth in West Sussex like his hero, Turner, or else the obsolete military pagodas at Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast – show Creffield able to tune himself to different modes or moods, all in the service of his attempt to ‘reconcile geometry with the organic’. The novelist Peter Ackroyd wrote in 1993 of his Petworth works: ‘The great floods of colour and the bright tonality continue Turner's own fantastic ceremonies of light, but in Creffield's paintings there is always the sense of the house and its land as organic, breathing forms.’ Of his depictions of Orford Ness, the architectural historian Jeremy Musson wrote: ‘Abandoned for twenty years the buildings on [Orford] Ness seem as if they belong to a different world [...] Such a remarkable landscape requires a remarkable artist to understand and interpret it: Dennis Creffield is such an artist’.