Keith Vaughan 1912-1977

A conscientious objector during World War II, Keith Vaughan served as a labourer in the Pioneer Corps, initially in Wiltshire and Derbyshire, before being transferred to a new Prisoner of War Camp in Malton, Yorkshire, in July 1943. He described the journey north as a voyage into unfamiliar territory:

the landscape became mysterious and exciting. Village cotages [sic] are built in rows like slum houses, not mean but hard and clamped into a hard landscape. They break out from the thinly covered rock slopes like vertebrae. … There is none of the prettiness of the south, no decoration, no trimmings, no striving to be different from each other.¹

Vaughan was engaged as an interpreter, because of his ability to speak German. Meanwhile, the camp and its surroundings formed the subject for landscapes and figures recorded in his sketchbooks and journals. Farm Near Malton depicts the buildings as anonymous cubes, with blank walls and windows. Overlaid are traces of trees and figures, none realised in detail. The overall palette reveals little further about the season or time of day: a pall of beige and leaden grey, reminiscent of army uniform, cloaks the landscape.

A retrospective of Vaughan’s drawings was held at the Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester, in 1967, with further works shown in the following year’s Christmas Exhibition. Reviewing the latter for The Guardian, Merete Bates paid particular attention to Vaughan’s work, noting,

It is interesting to find the rudiments of Keith Vaughan in sketches from 1945. Landscapes arabesque into sunlight, key to blue and gold, grey and green. Figure studies simplify limbs, combine double views in one.²

¹ Keith Vaughan, Journal and Drawings 1939–1965 (London: Alan Ross, 1966), p. 66.

² Merete Bates, ‘Christmas exhibitions’, The Guardian (21 December 1968), p. 6.

Private Collection, UK

Manchester, Tib Lane Gallery, December 1968

The subject of a figure in an orchard picking fruit, or in a landscape reaching up to branches, occurs frequently in Vaughan’s painting, (see Figures Climbing Trees, 1946, Figure Beneath a Tree Branch, 1947, Man Gathering Fruit, 1948 and Water Trees and Figures, 1948). On a formal level it opened up the human form and the dynamic gesture increased the emotional potential of the male figure. Here a young boy hangs on to a branch above his head. His clothing implies it is summertime, though the bare branches of the tree might indicate otherwise. He is alone, save for the presence of his dog. The mood is melancholic and, like so many of Vaughan’ s paintings, an unexplained air of sadness hangs about him.

One of Vaughan’ s accomplishments was to cultivate the medium of gouache away from its use in advertising and commercial studios and increase its expressive range in fine art painting. Indian ink and watery washes are combined to play off against opaque gouache passages of harmonized colour. The effect is strengthened by the inclusion of Vaughan’s ubiquitous scratched-in, inky lines, which delineate the subject and reinforce the design. He discussed his use of these materials in an interview some years later:

Those early pictures were not of course pure gouache. They were mixtures of wax crayon, Indian ink and gouache. And the chemical properties of these different materials to a large extent determined their own control. They react on each in certain ways which can be exploited but cannot be prevented. You might call it a volatile medium. Oil paint is quite different. It is a totally inert medium which will do nothing of its own accord, except get you messed up.

(Keith Vaughan, interview with Dr. Tony Carter, 1963)

Agnew’s, London, 1990

Private collection, U.K.

Instituto de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires, Keith Vaughan Pinturas Y Dibujos, November 1950, no. 18
Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, Keith Vaughan 1912-1977, November – December 1989, no. 5
Agnew’s, London, Keith Vaughan 1912-1977, November – December 1990, no. 58, p.8

As dusk descends and a dense night sky closes in, three bathers emerge from the sea, showing no urgency to leave after their swim. Behind them, the horizon can be seen in the dying light. They neither communicate nor interact with one another, but dry themselves off in an unexpectedly pensive manner. We are provided with no visual cues to explain their sombre mood. In Western art, the male nude is typically presented as heroic and active, conforming to established ideals of virility and masculinity; Vaughan’s conception, by contrast, is passive and introspective.
Group of Bathers demonstrates certain technical advances in Vaughan’s handling of oil paint and use of colour. The stiffness and awkward modelling evident in his earlier work give way to a more confident application of pigment. The figures are rendered with tactile richness, as patches of evening light penetrate the overhanging branches and fall across their bodies. The illumination of their dappled skin incorporates a range of colours – iron ochre, Prussian blue, orange and cadmium yellow – producing decorative complexity and physical immediacy.
Although absorbed in quiet, private actions, the figures are nonetheless presented as young and virile. The treatment of their limbs suggests their bodies are capable of athletic and energetic movement. The sinuous, repeated arcs of back, spine and outstretched arm are echoed elsewhere in the setting through rhyming curves. These organic rhythms are set against the formality of straight lines and angles, defining their towels spread out onthe geometrically shaped rocks.
The bathers, unaware of the viewer’s presence, exemplify a generic figure type that formed the basis of Vaughan’s conception of the male nude for several years: round-headed, youthful, long-limbed and contemplative. In the foreground, one raises an arm while crossing his torso with the other, as if drying himself with an invisible towel; his left leg is modelled through subtle modulations of shadow drawn from the surrounding blues. The thick-thighed profile figure at the left quietly dries his hands, head bowed in concentration. The central figure, last to emerge from the rockpool, adopts a pose that recurs frequently in Vaughan’s work, appearing in paintings such as Stooping Bather, completed the same year. This pose serves three functions. The vertical supporting leg anchors the figure. The other bent leg suggests movement and vitality, while introducing a sense of restrained eroticism.

Peter Gimpel
Mrs L. Coleman
Mrs Gillian Raffles
Anthony Hepworth, Bath
Prof. J. Ball
Private collection, U.K.
Private collection, U.K.

Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, London, 1962, cat. no. 128 (ill. pl. XXI)
A. Hepworth, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, exhibition catalogue, London, 2007, p. 16 (ill.)
A. Hepworth, The Hargreaves and BallTrust Selected Works, London, 2010, p. 6 (ill.)

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, University of Durham, Hatton Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, 1956, no. 18 (where titled Bathers); touring exhibition, Arts Council, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, 1957
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, 1962, cat. no. 128
London, Olympia Fine Art and Antiques Fair, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings, 2002, no. 472
Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, 2007, cat. no. 7
Anthony Hepworth, London, The Hargreaves and Ball Trust Selected Works, 2010
Chichester, Pallant House, Keith Vaughan: Romanticism to Abstraction, 2012

The Leicester Galleries, London
R. Muir, Esq.
The Piccadilly Gallery, London
Mrs. Swanhild Castle, New York
Private Collection, UK

In 1949 Vaughan visited Brittany cycling around Finistère staying in small villages and hamlets, and making drawings as he went. What he found there came as a surprise. Instead of a sun-drenched landscape and colourful inhabitants, he discovered a harsh, dour but, nevertheless, dramatic landscape. It had a significant effect on his painting. He wrote in his journal:

Returned from France with little regret. Enjoyed much but without the whole of me. Saw France for what it was – a setting, without the allure of its imagined romantic possibilities. Was faintly repelled by the noise, stridency, smells which hitherto had been veiled by romanticism. (Journals, September 24, 1949)

On his return, he produced a series of paintings, including Poulgoazec, depicting the stone cottages, local villages, harbours, fishermen and lobster catchers. His palette is muted to reflect the largely monochromatic, coastal villages he had visited. Careful note has been taken of the vernacular architecture of Brittany including the whitewashed walls, grey slate roofs, dressed stone, and modest fenestration. He even adds a decorative ‘ogee-arch’ door at the right of the composition – a local architectural feature.

The formal arrangement of the composition comprises geometric shapes of rooftops, tilted chimneys and windows, sprung arcs upturned fishing boats and architectural arches. At the bottom left, three fishermen huddled in conversation, represent the insular Celtic community he discovered.

Julius Fleischmann
Mr & Mrs Nick Lott
Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath
Private collection, U.K.

Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, London, 1962, pl. xxvii (ill. – not exhibited)

A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p. 86, cat. no. 163 (ill. b&w)

London, Leicester Galleries, Keith Vaughan: Paintings, 1953, cat. no. 7

London, Olympia Fine Art and Antiques Fair, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings, 2002, no. 431

Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, 2007 cat. no. 17

Vaughan produced many oil paintings and gouaches on the subject of gardeners, farmers and men labouring on the land and especially so during the mid-1950s including Man Sharpening a Sickle (1953), Harvest Assembly, (1956) and Two Labourers (1956). The subject of rural labour had preoccupied him since the start of the war when he was conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps and put to work clearing the land, digging trenches and bringing in the harvest. He made hundreds of ink drawings and gouaches of his fellow conscripts at work and considered man’s connection to the land and the seasons as something worthwhile and inspiring. Images of rustic toil had also formed the basis of much of the work of Nineteenth century British painters, such as William Blake, Samuel Palmer and Edward Calvert, artists that Vaughan very much admired.

The empty wheelbarrow, emblematic of work and rural labour, is the focal point of the composition. Its two arc-like handles direct our gaze towards the gardener, at the right, busying himself in the shed. Yellow ochres and burnt umbers indicate an autumnal setting, one of the busiest times of the year for the country labourer.

Most of Vaughan’s so-called gouaches, including Wheelbarrow and Gardener, are in fact, executed in mixed media. During the 1930s, while he worked as a designer at Lintas Advertising Agency, gouache (or poster paint), was a medium he used daily to achieve flat areas of tone and to obliterate unwanted forms. Later, once he left the company, he developed the medium by transferring its use to the artist’s studio and extending its expressive range in his painting by combining it with pen, pencil, Indian ink and sometimes wax-resist. He further evolved his use of gouache during the war when army life precluded large-scale oil painting or easel work and was forced to carry his entire studio equipment around in his regulation knapsack.

Vaughan called gouache painting his ‘volatile medium’ since working with it often produced unexpected and capricious results. Here we see underlying pencil marks employed variously to guide his brush or block in general compositional forms. Vaughan’s rapid execution retains the freshness and spontaneity of a sketch. Watery passages of paint are played off against opaque areas of pigment, while rivulets of ink bleed into still-wet patches of colour. At the left, within the golden, translucent wash, we see a characteristic frothy texture. Vaughan discovered this effect by accident one day, having failed to rinse his brushes thoroughly after cleaning them. The next morning, left-over detergent in the bristles produced a frothy texture which remained on the surface of the paper once the gouache had dried.

The Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester
Private Collection, U.K. (acquired from the above)

Vaughan painted two landscapes entitled Iowa Farm, both the same size and worked in oil on board. In 1959, he was appointed Painter in Residence at Iowa State University, where he worked for six months and gained much-needed stimulation from colleagues and students. During this period, he produced a series of landscapes in both oils and gouaches, each marked by a heightened sense of formal structure and design. The optimism he encountered in American painting fostered a new expressive eloquence in his handling of pigment, encouraging him to move beyond the restraint that had characterised much of his earlier work.
In Iowa Farm II, Vaughan achieves a precise balance between the figurative and the abstract. The composition grows from observed motifs (barn doors, tree boughs, gable ends, distant foliage and foreground fields), yet these are not described directly. Instead, they are distilled into structural blocks and interlocking planes, translating the features of the countryside into a rigorous formal language. Pastoral details become the scaffolding for an exploration of rhythm, balance and spatial tension, revealing Vaughan’s ability to reconcile observed reality with modernist formal concerns.

Private collection
Redfern Gallery, London
Anthony & Madeleine Carter (1960s)
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel, London

A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol,2012, p. 115, no. AH293

London, Matthiesen Gallery, Recent Paintings and Sculpture, 1962

Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1964
Estate of Keith Vaughan, 1977
Professor John Ball and Dr. Gordon Hargreaves (acquired from the above according to a label, verso)
Tom West (acquired from the above, 1987, according to a label, verso) 
Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath
Private collection, France (purchased from the above in 2002)

M. Yorke, Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work, Constable, London, 1990, p. 218, (ill. b&w)
A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils, 1946-77, Sansom and Co., Bristol, 2012, cat. no. AH381. p. 140

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Keith Vaughan: New Paintings, 1964, cat. no. 44 (ill.)
Bath, Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, 1999
Bath, Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, 2002

Like many artists, Keith Vaughan often turned to Ancient Greece as a source of inspiration, as a way to position himself within a respected art-historical canon, and to licence subversive material in his artworks. Vaughan’s ambition was to constructing a notion of universal humanity in his works. As the classical world has long been considered the birthplace of Western civilisation, and Greek mythology contains many foundational narratives, antiquity can act as a means of representing some sort of common human experience. Simultaneously, Vaughan, under the notion of “Greek Love” used the Greek landscape and mythological scenes to express his desires, as a gay man. Vaughan struggled throughout his life with reconciling his personal impulses with the monumental aims of his work and used the ancient world to express this duality.
Mythological narratives are also often found in his works. In Study for Laocoon Group VIII, Vaughan references the myth of Laocoön, a Trojan priest who was killed alongside his two sons by a giant serpent as divine punishment, most famously depicted in the ancient statue Laocoon and His Sons, produced between 27 BC and AD 68. The statue’s art-historical significance, often considered ‘the prototypical icon of human agony’ in Western art, would have appealed to Vaughan’s desire to represent universal experiences and emotions in his work. However, the artist himself also wrote that ‘for him… [the idea behind the Laocoon myth] is that it represents… man’s conflict with his environment… with himself’ and the evils of temptation. Therefore, Vaughan’s reimagining of the Laocoön Group could also be an exploration of his personal struggle with experiencing homosexual desire in the era in which he lived.

Sir Misha Black
Private Collection
Offer Waterman and Co., London
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan – The Mature Oils, 1846-1977, Samson & Company, 2014, cat. no. AH456, p. 161 (ill.)

London, Marlborough New London Gallery, Keith Vaughan New Paintings, no. 23

In 1964, Vaughan bought a row of derelict cottages in the heart of the Essex countryside and set about renovating them. He created a small studio upstairs where he worked on small-scale oil paintings and gouaches at the weekends and during the summer months. Having nowhere to swim, he cleared a patch of land at end of the garden and excavated a waterhole. Railway sleepers interspersed with plants were dug into a shallow embankment to create a picturesque setting. The pool was more than a mere source of recreation. The theme of bathers had been a central subject in Vaughan’s work since the mid 1940s and now he began to paint friends reclining and drying themselves at the water’s edge in his garden. Two Bathers by a Pool depicts such a scene. 

Fellow artists were invited to visit Harrow Hill cottage at weekends. Patrick Procktor was a regular guest from 1966 onwards as was Mario Dubsky, one of Vaughan’s most talented pupils at the Slade. He recalled days spent making drawings of each other by the pool and Vaughan being at his most relaxed:

‘Keith and Patrick and I had some great fun. We held summer parties in the garden, swimming naked of course, and drank freezing drinks in between skinny dips in the pool. Mrs. Vaughan sometimes sat knitting in her deckchair, at the other end [of the garden], keeping a watchful eye on us. God knows what she thought of me and Patrick larking around after several gins. But we also had some serious discussions well into the night, about painting and literature. Keith would tell me what I should be reading. Patrick and Keith used to talk endlessly about the ways they could turn their personal experiences of life into art.’1

Procktor also brought with him the filmmaker Derek Jarman who, apparently, loved nothing better than to strip down and dive off the railway sleepers into the pool. The BAFTA-winning documentary maker Peter Adam visited along with his illustrious friends, including David Hockney, the grand master of the pool-painting genre. He recalled them all swimming and wallowing together in Vaughan’s garden pond – a far cry from the glamorous Californian pools he was used to:

‘David was living in Los Angeles but on his annual visit to his family in Bradford, (his mother still thought that it was the sun that bleached his hair!), he always took care to visit Keith. Once we drove in his new Morris Minor convertible to Essex. We splashed about in his little natural pool…All that amused Keith greatly.’2

1. Mario dubsky, from gerard hastings, ‘paradise found and lost: keith vaughan inessex’, pagham press, 2016 ,

2. Peter adam, from ‘gerard hastings, keith vaughan: the photographs’,pagham press, 2013

Austin / Desmond Fine Art, London
Christie’s, June 1991
Roberto Ceriani, U.S.A.
Redfern Gallery, London 
Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

Vaughan painted two versions of Village After Sunset in 1968. Neither contain the usual pictorial clues such as a church steeple, a distinctive architectural feature, or any other identifying marker that might allow the village to be precisely located. In the late 1960s, Vaughan spent weekends, as well as periods of summer and winter at Harrow Hill Cottage, his home near Toppesfield. The painting is therefore best understood as a generic conception of a neighbouring Essex village. When the weather permitted, he drove around the surrounding countryside, taking photographs and making drawings, some of which he worked up into paintings in his small studio there.

Vaughan’s handling of paint became so expressive and his technique so eloquent that oil paint began to function as a pictorial counterpart of the soil, foliage, and topographical features of the Essex landscape. Techniques of alla prima and wet-on-wet painting create viscous textures. Vaughan evokes ploughed fields and dense wooded thickets through translucent washes and rich impasto layers in his agricultural scenes. In Village After Sunset II, the glow of summer evening light flickers across innumerable surfaces (some perhaps architectural, others more overtly organic), producing a dazzling prism of colour. Vaughan’s tendency to fracture topographical elements into quilt-like patterns is indebted to Cézanne and Analytical Cubism, though his palette remains markedly more varied. 

The Artist’s Estate (1977)
Austin / Desmond Fine Art, London
Private collection, U.K.

Mr and Mrs J. Wiltshire

Private collection, Belgium

Austin / Desmond, Keith Vaughan, exhibition catalogue, 1989, p. 91 (ill.)

P. Vann and G. Hastings, Keith Vaughan, Lund Humphries, Osborne Samuel, 2012, p. 127, no. 130 (ill.)

A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77,

Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p. 173, no. AH502 (ill.)

London, Austin / Desmond, Keith Vaughan, 1989, no. 98

London, Agnew’s, 1990, no. 26

Vaughan was interested in how the heavy frosts and deep snows of winterhad the capacity to transform the familiar. During his years at Harrow Hill Cottage in Essex, he produced no fewer than eleven oil paintings depicting snowscapes. This large-scale example is characteristic of his later, simplified style. It is based on one of a series of Kodachrome transparencies hetook over the winter of 1971-72, which recalled the effects of sustained snowfall. They gave rise to several other winter landscapes, including Snow Drift at Harrow Hill, 1970/72; Landscape under Snow I and II, 1971; Small Winter Landscape I and II, 1972 and, three years later, Winter Landscape of 1975.
The prevailing whiteness of Winter Landscape is achieved through exposing the primed surface. Colour is sparingly deployed: dark areas of burnt umber describe trees and undergrowth, while occasional blue passages in the upper areas denotethe sky without recourse to a horizon line. Diluted pigment is brushed onto the surface in a series of slanting gestures, evoking bare winter foliage, twigs, boughs and branches emerging through a heavy quilting of snow. Vaughan, who was right-handed, habitually worked with diagonal brush marks that incline to the right. Many of his compositions tilt and bend in this manner. Here, this directional bias lends the surface a quiet, but persistent, sense of movement. The painting’s visual sparsity and economy of means mirror the austerity of winter itself, while chromatic restraint echoes the season’s bareness and arrested growth.

The Artist’s Estate
Agnew’s Gallery, London
Private collection, U.K. (since 1990)

A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sanson & Co., Bristol, 2012, p. 191, no. AH592 (ill.)
Agnew’s, exhibition catalogue, 1990, p. 41 (ill.)

London, Agnew’s, 1990, no. 41
London, Agnew’s, Keith Vaughan, 2012, no. 32

While at Codford Army Camp Vaughan spent most of 1941 in ‘ misery and discomfort, living in tents. Everything covered in dust and ants.’ During the day he ‘ hauled and hugged and staggered with sacks of coal through continuous rain’ and, during the evenings, he filled his sketchbook with small ink and wash drawings of his comrades and their daily activities. Two journal entries sum up the misery of those days:

June/July 1941: Codford. The rank smell of grass and canvas and warm men. Two latrine buckets filled to the brim each evening. All our bodily functions are performed communally, a gesture of privacy being offered by a thin sheet of canvas. Often I wake with a sense of terror at the sequence of mornings that lie ahead from which there is no escape. One longs to sink back into the oblivion of sleep.

November 1941:

At six o’ clock the guard’ s cane smacks the taut canvas of the tent. Nobody moves but everyone is instantly awake and weighing the agony of getting up against the penalty of staying in the warm cocoon of blankets.

The guard can be heard in the distance thrashing the canvas of the other tents. Presently a tremor passes through the tent like the disturbance of sediment at the bottom of a heated flask. A hand emerges from its blanket and gropes for matches to light a candle. Sleepy but emphatic curses break out. When it is already late everyone gets up together and fights their shivering way into clothes, burrowing into the ruined heaps of kit to find their belongings. With practised skill we knead our blankets into the regulation mould and crawl through the opening, forgetting always the hooks which hoist us back again by the loops on our trousers. Outside the moon is still high and we start the perilous journey over slippery mud and through the minefield of guy ropes and tent pegs to the marquee.

These were Vaughan’ s lowest days in the army and he consoled himself with the fact that he was part of a company of others who each had to endure the same hardships. This comradeship was something he had not known since his school days. He thought that by making visual records of the life he and his fellow conscripts led during the war, he was contributing to the body of war art ,that was being produced not only by official war artists, but ordinary people. Indeed some of his paintings were exhibited in an exhibition of war art held by Kenneth Clark at the National Gallery, and a handful were bought by the nation as recognised war paintings.

Mercury Gallery, London
TWP Herbert, 1990
Sir Jeffrey Tate CBE

Vaughan read the work of Arthur Rimbaud from an early age and made dozens of paintings, gouaches and pencil drawings inspired by his poetry. Over the course of 1942/3, he fell in love with Bill Greest, a young married conscript who was unable to return his feelings. His journal echoes the inextinguishable longings of Rimbaud’s poem, Une Saison en Enfer. Feeling the need to give visual expression to poetry which reflected his own troubled circumstances, Vaughan made a series of paintings in gouache, pen, ink and wax-resist which included Ah Cette Vie De Mon Enfance. Five years later he showed them to John Lehmann who suggested they should illustrate a new edition of Rimbaud’s poems. The Whitechapel catalogue for Vaughan’s important 1962 retrospective informs us that:
These drawings were subsequently revised and reworked, with a number of associated studies in various media, all of which provided the basis for a set of eight three-coloured lithographic illustrations in the new edition of Rimbaud’s book published by John Lehmann, London, 1949. The artist was responsible for the layout and general design of the book, which was translated by Norman Cameron.

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection of British Neo-Romantic Art

Monnow Valley Arts, The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection of British Neo-Romantic Art. ABC Print Ltd: Hereford. p.45

This work, from the early 1940s, is thoroughly Neo-Romantic in style and character. Vaughan was in the habit of putting together densely worked sheets of related studies comprising various pages of his sketchbooks. These were pasted down on separate, larger sheets and re-worked as a whole then housed in special hand-made folders. Despite using only the most basic materials of pencil, pen and ink, diluted gouache and crayon, Vaughan was able to produce complex visual ideas with great emotional impact.

Although a fine German speaker, Vaughan was somewhat dyslexic. He titled this work Seligheit but probably intended to use the German word seligkeit , which translates as ‘ bliss’ or ‘ salvation’ . His highly personal journals reveal that he felt emotionally remote from the rest of the world and his paintings of figures sheltering in coves and caves were an instinctual act of self-preservation in a hostile world. He produced three works entitled Seligheit and subsequently exhibited them in his Whitechapel retrospective exhibition in 1962, indicating that the theme carried considerable significance for him. Each possess a cocoon or womb-like quality, as if the crouching figure has located the bliss of a secret place of shelter and safety.

Vaughan’ s inscription implies the date of execution to be 1944. However, the signature and date, inscribed in ballpoint pen, were added long after he completed the study sheet and it was more likely to have been made in early 1943. The study at the upper right has been squared up ready to be transferred to a larger image and was used as the basis for the cover design of ‘ New Writing and Daylight’ in the summer of that year. It was also used again in a bookplate that he designed for Mervyn Jones Evans, however the cave-like shelter in which the figure crouches was transformed into a shell.

Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester
Mr & Mrs Geoffrey Green (acquired directly from the artist) ,
Allen Freer

Whitechapel Art Gallery, London: Keith Vaughan – Retrospective Exhibition. March-April 1962, cat.no. 12. ,
Olympia, London. Keith Vaughan. February-March 2002. cat no. KV 458
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester: Keith Vaughan – A Centenary Exhibition. March-June 2012.

Leicester Galleries, London, 1959

New Art Centre, London

Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection, U.K.

This is one of Vaughan’ s most unusual and puzzling male nudes. A figure sits in an armchair motionless and in profile while staring towards something unseen at the right. In all anatomical respects he is human but we are struck by his facial resemblance to a primate. No pictorial clues are offered as to why Vaughan has represented the figure in such a manner and he makes no enlightening reference to this in his journal, nor did he paint any comparable works. It is certainly enigmatic and perplexing. Nevertheless it remains a compelling image and we are forced to stare intently at the figure as he intently stares out of the picture plane.

Ten years before he painted Seated Figure Vaughan discussed his approach to his painting in gouache in his journal:

July 31st 1943

One thing seems pretty clear now about my painting. I do not paint as a result of a visual experience, or from any positive urge to expression. My painting is compensatory. I start with an excited awareness of certain materials, Indian ink, white paint, ochre, chalk, and a more or less contained predisposition for certain forms, the stone circle, rock forms, elemental non-precise forms, and seek to arrange them in a way which will relive and satisfy me. As every possible known or unknown arrangement is open to me, the question of which to use becomes bewitching.

Thomas Agnew & Sons

Private Collection, UK

In the early 1960s, inspired by his students, in particular Mario Dubsky (1939–1985), Vaughan began to experiment with working in charcoal on a large scale. Dubsky studied at the Slade, and on leaving was awarded the Abbey Major Scholarship by a committee including Vaughan. From him Vaughan learnt how to blend charcoal, rubbing it into the paper, to create subtle grades of black that could be cut through or highlighted by an eraser.

The potential of the medium is demonstrated superbly by Two Men (1970), in which Vaughan contrasts the gentlest shading, used to define the centre of the left figure’s torso, and thus the twist of his body, with the velvety depth of shadow outlining his shoulder. Between the two figures are medium tones, and upon the draped cloth can be seen the smudged imprint of Vaughan’s own fingers. Against this, strong charcoal lines select and convey the outline of an ear, a navel, nostrils – only those details necessary to characterise the mood, the attitude, of the composition.

Linking the two men there is a homoerotic charge all the more powerful because of its ambiguity. The righthand figure’s intense gaze and proprietorial posture are countered by the left’s seeming casualness. Both are virile, unselfconsciously naked. It is a moment suspended: where it might lead – to passion, detachment or malevolence – is open to conjecture.

The Artist’s Estate

Agnew’s 

Private Collection, UK

Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan Journals (1939-1976), ill. p.214

Agnew’s, British Art 1900-1998, September – October 1998, no.113

The Artist’s Estate
The Belgrave Gallery, London
Austin Desmond Fine Art, London
Private Collection

A rare female subject, a situation possibly stemming from his use of models in the life-rooms of the leading London art schools where he taught- first Camberwell during the late 1940s followed by the Central school in the 1950s, and finally the Slade (1960s). At the Central, Vaughan made still life drawing of table motifs of the kind that appears behind the semi-reclining female figure here. At the Slade, he joined in life sessions with the students, thereby ‘teaching’ by example.
‘Female Nude in Interior’ is a densely hatched, worked-up pencil composition constructed with firm, heavily inscribed, and swiftly shaded marks. The barely touched areas that define the figure impart a fleshy luminosity against the dark interior. Gerald Hastings has described some of Vaughan’s 1960s drawings- of which this is a likely period example- as being “more aggressively forged with dense graphite surfaces built up in webs and meshes of cross-hatchings” [1]. It was indeed during the 1960s that David Thompson, author of the artist’s 1964 Whitechapel Art Gallery retrospective catalogue, described “a formidable draughtsman who achieved uncommon eloquence with pencil and pen”.

1) Gerald Hastings “Keith Vaughan-Gouaches, Drawings, and Prints”, p9, Osborne Samuel, 2011

The Artist’s Estate
The Belgrave Gallery , London
Private Collection

Redfern Gallery, London
Bohun Gallery, Henley
Private collection, London