Accompanied by an extensive exhibition history, Fishermen and Bathers dates from 1951 and is among Vaughan’s most significant and acclaimed paintings of the immediate post-war years. It was certainly his most ambitious pictorial statement up to that point, since it attained a new sensuousness in the handling of rich, textured pigments and demonstrated a fresh confidence in the construction of complex figure compositions. The work was previously owned by Dr. Gordon Hargreaves and his partner John Ball who was a Professor of Zoology at Sheffield University. Close friends of Vaughan, they amassed the finest collection of his work and were referred to as ‘The Sheffield Boys’ in his private journal and letters.
Fisherman and Bathers was exhibited in 1981 at a major retrospective of Vaughan’s work held at the Geffrye Museum (now the Museum of the Home). In the exhibition catalogue Images of Man, Professor Ball wrote: ‘One of the most ambitious of Vaughan’s early figure compositions, Fishermen and Bathers has claims to be considered the prototype of the pivotal series of Assemblies of Figures.’ There are nine large-scale oil paintings in this body of work, but it is with First Assembly of Figures (1952) and Second Assembly of Figures (1953), in the collections of Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, and Manchester City Galleries respectively, that the closest parallels may be found. The placement, poses and gestures of the standing male figures, with an arm raised over the head, or folded below the chest, are clearly derived from Fishermen and Bathers. Other similarities in the Second Assembly, include the use of a muted palette and a dark, sandy beach setting. The twin subjects of fishermen unloading their catch and bathers on beaches appear frequently in Vaughan’s work. They legitimised his use of the male nude at a time when the subject was viewed with derision and more than a little suspicion, and they offered Vaughan the opportunity to create emotional and physical tensions within his compositions. The catalogue raisonné entry for Fishermen and Bathers states:
‘Created following his visit to Finistère in 1949, this work is arranged in a long landscape format, with two central figures placed equidistant to the centre of the picture, both looking downwards, and a third figure gazing out towards the viewer. The third figure’s position behind the rowing dinghy is vaguely reminiscent of the figure of Theseus, who happens upon the reclining Minotaur in Vaughan’s magnificent Theseus and the Minotuare of the same year. The final two figures of the group, one to our far left and set back in the middle distance, and the other to the far right of the picture act to balance the composition and give a feeling of quiet drama.’1
In 1951 Fishermen and Bathers was exhibited in Vaughan’s major solo show at the Lefevre Gallery, London. Patrick Heron commented on the exhibition:
‘Vaughan is making huge strides: these latest pictures show a conquest of colour and luminosity, the previous lack of which have been his chief defect. Matisse has been involved whether Mr Vaughan knows it or not. The result, however, is that Keith Vaughan is now the best of the ‘Lefevre Group’ of younger painters.’2
Later, Keith Vaughan’s biographer Malcolm Yorke also singled out the painting for praise when discussing the period, 1946-1951:
‘When he moved his figures outdoors again, as in the ambitious Fishermen and Bathers (1951),
their isolation and alienation remain: each of the five men in that picture is facing a different way and no two are overlapping or touching. Here, too, the cool, dark colouring derived from his 1949 travels in Finistère (‘a harsh dour and dramatic landscape: black, white, grey and ochre’) serves as a restraint on easy sensuality and forces us back to considering the formal qualities of the
picture. The painter-critic Patrick Heron pointed out that Vaughan had borrowed his boats-and-cliffs theme from Braque, but they are organised like landscapes, with a spatial sense of a middle distance and a horizon, and not, as Braque’s landscapes are, like a still life.
1.Hepworth and Massey, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-1977, A Commentary and Catalogue Raisonné, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, p.702.
2. Patrick Heron, New Statesman, Summer 1951
3. Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan, His Life and Work, Constable & Co., London, 1990, p. 148