His remarkable, incandescent series depicting The Visitation grew out of erotic, private depictions of women caught, in his words, between ‘sleeping and waking’. An outstanding series of charcoals from the 1980s, variously called Anxious Father Anxious Baby or God and the Baby, relates Creffield’s own feelings about fatherhood to God’s love of his human progeny.

The Old Masters’ treatment of religious scenes was always an important touchstone, and Creffield completed transcriptions after Duccio, Michelangelo and Bellini. ‘I've learned so much from pre-Renaissance art, from all that wonderful medieval art, from ethnographic art, from prehistoric art. I saw a fantastic medieval Madonna in Winchester cathedral which seems to be worth anything Leonardo made,’ he wrote in 1990. The painter and critic William Packer wrote of Creffield that ‘The artist’s vision is a collaboration between past and present, between the living and the dead painter’. Creffield also communed with later, more secular artists through transcriptions of Cezanne’s bathers or Louis Le Nain’s peasant families. ‘I have often worked from the Old Masters […] It was helpful to take some else's painting and play it like a record. As it were reconducting it,’ Creffield explained.