Flower paintings such as Easter Lily or Snow and Roses, named for a Louis MacNeice poem, are like gems, or lyric poems, for the grace of their colour and composition. While there is a religious quality to works like Easter Lily, other flower paintings are almost erotic in their sensuous abundance – perhaps especially the paintings titled Within a Budding Grove,completed in 1982. The stove in his home in Leeds, or his desk in Brighton – figures on a chessboard, or vanitas paintings depicting skulls with flowers – each is lent a numinous presence by his assertive brush-strokes, which yet resolve into an intense impression of the object’s physicality. Creffield’s studio was always a trove of such objects, as Dan Hofstadter memorably described in the New Yorker in 1990: ‘It was the apartment of an old-fashioned bohemian who lived and breathed art, with reproductions and sketches and knicknacks piled up everywhere and proliferating over the walls and tables....’