Keith Vaughan 1912-1977

Vaughan was only nineteen or twenty when he painted Rural Landscape. While working at Lintas Advertising agency, during the 1930s, he was in the habit of making weekend trips to see friends in Suffolk. He travelled all over East Anglia looking for subjects to paint and, in his earliest surviving depictions of barns and farm buildings, we can already see the formal shapes and compositional arrangements that were to underpin his mature work until the mid 1970s.

At first sight Rural Landscape is unrecognisable as a Keith Vaughan painting, even to those familiar with his work. And yet, if it is carefully considered and compared to other paintings, we begin to detect various traits, albeit in embryonic form, which will mature and develop into characteristic qualities. 

For someone without a formal art education this watercolour is technically proficient. For example, the use of subtle aerial perspective, whereby the forms further away from the picture plane become lighter and more translucent, is handled with impressive assurance.

 Judging by the leafless trees and the colour palette, this is an autumnal or, possibly, an early spring scene. Two thick-set dray horses graze beside some farm buildings. It is an idyllic scene that communicates something of the tranquillity of the inter-war tears. Without doubt this was painted in situ. Watercolour requires less equipment than oil painting, is more easily transportable. Vaughan was in the habit of going off on painting trips with his haversack containing his portable studio.

Rural Landscape is related to another watercolour version with the same title. It is also connected to an early oil painting entitled The Barn (1935). Similarities in subject matter and colouration may be detected. The geometrical shapes of square windows, open barn doors, triangular gable-ends and pitched roofs recur throughout Vaughan’s paintings of landscapes and especially towards the end of his career (see Tilbury-Juxta-Clare (1970), Bulmer Tye (1972) and Harrow Hill (1975). These forms supplied the formal pictorial structures he favoured in his compositions. 

We are reminded of the presence and intervention of man in nature by the outhouses, sheds and farm buildings. Even the inclusion of horses and farm animals was to return (see Out to Pasture, Two Figures with Cow and farm Building, Landscape with Cow and Farm Building, and Landscape with Animals, all dating from 1973). 

The pastoral idyll can be traced back to William Blake and Samuel Palmer. The presence of man in their work, as it is here, is implied rather than directly represented and the evidence of his good management and husbandry communicates something health-giving and moral to the viewer.

The Redfern Gallery,
Private Collection

Private Collection, U.K.

Catherine House Gallery, Marlborough,
Askew Art

Agnew’s, London, 1985
Private Collection, U.K.

Keith Vaughan: Journal and Drawings, 1939-1965, London, p. 59.

Vaughan’s war images are important historical documents concerned with the daily life of the Non-Combatant Pioneer Corps. While the official war artists recorded the more narratively dramatic and intense aspects of war, he immortalised the mundane, every-day events (see Breakfast in the Marquee (1942).

Graham Sutherland chronicled the horrors of the blitz, John Piper composed visual elegies to the bombed-out ruins of churches and Henry Moore documented the human terror experienced nightly in the subterranean London shelters. Vaughan was much more mundane in his selection of subjects and depicted soldiers constructing camps, showering themselves, urinating in the latrines, felling trees and peeling potatoes. His focus was on the day-to-day activities of his comrades and the overlooked moments of their routine existence. He scrutinised monotonous events undertaken by men separated from their loved ones and thrown together as part of the war effort. Their labours and recreations alike were detailed and documented by him as though the tedium of their humdrum existence was, in itself, a kind of heroic exercise.

In Potato Peeling, three men sit quietly as they scrape away at the mountain of potatoes required to feed Number 9 Company; they don’t speak, look or interact with each other as they get on with the mind-numbing activity. Vaughan has subtly arranged the group so that we view one figure from behind, another from the front and the third in profile. They are placed slightly to the left of the composition as though to marginalise them and communicate something of the boredom and dreariness of their labour.

In the hierarchy of army activities, cookhouse duty was considered the least worthy and the most emasculating. Certainly in the 1940s, cooking would have been identified as a woman’s activity and the preparation of vegetables was regarded as the least gallant activity imaginable. Vaughan interprets the scene with, perhaps, some gentle humour and more than a little sympathy.

He made another, more finished version of this subject a little later entitled Peeling Potatoes. In this he has worked over the figures with wax resists and coloured crayons. It is more intimate and, in some ways more poignant. The composition has been reduced to only two figures and this significantly concentrates the relationship between them. The gesture of the left figure, ostensibly reaching for another potato to peel, could also be interpreted as a more intimate reaching out towards his companion. As ever with Vaughan, this kind of intimacy is veiled and deliberately masked.

Concerning his art materials at this time, Vaughan had this to say: 

An artist who finds himself in the position of an ordinary soldier in the army can, I think, take one of two courses. He can put away his paints and brushes, forget all about his craft, submit himself without reserve to his new experiences, and hope that he will return to his work afterwards richer and wiser. On the other hand, he can trim his sails to a minimum, if it is only a note book and a pencil, and try and keep something going…On New Year’s Day, 1941, the first thing that went into my brand new army haversack was the largest drawing book it would accommodate and an unbreakable bottle of black ink…I now spent my off-duty hours with a pad on my knee on my bed in a barrack room. For a year I drew the raw material that was in front of me.⁶ 

Within a few years Vaughan’s considerable body of wartime drawings, such as Potato Peeling, had gained some public recognition. In December 1942, for example, a small suite of them was exhibited in a group show at the Lefevre Gallery. In 1943 the War Artists’ Advisory Committee purchased twelve of his pen and ink drawings and some of them were shown in an exhibition of war art at the National Gallery organised by Kenneth Clark.

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⁶ Introduction to Vaughan’s exhibition catalogue for the Lefevre Gallery, 1942

Private Collection, U.K.

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

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.

Bonham’s: November 8. 2007
The Lefevre Gallery

Private Collection, U.K.

Over the summer of 1942 No. 9 Company was given the task of clearing the grounds of Ashton Gifford House to which the Greenways Preparatory School children had been evacuated from Bognor Regis. Occasionally local children and school pupils joined in the task. The house was a three-story, Neo-Classical building whose extensive grounds were overrun with vegetation. The romantic setting inspired several paintings from Vaughan over the course of the next few years, including The Working Party, 1942, Tree Felling at Ashton Gifford, 1942/3 and The Garden at Ashton Gifford, 1944. Clearing the woodland not only offered the soldiers worthwhile community service but also provided fuel for the barrack room stoves. Dozens of trees were felled using little more than chopping axes and then cut up into regulation-sized logs with handsaws. It was blistering employment especially so in the hot summer months.

Vaughan made dozens of sketches of his company’s activities in his sketchbook, usually in pen and ink and sometimes in pencil. He seems to have been particularly thorough in his preparations for The Working Party which is among his most ambitious wartime images. He filled several sketchbooks with rapidly executed studies, some drawn at great speed to capture the dynamism of the figures splitting and hauling branches. Further drawings depict the men chopping and sawing, dragging enormous boughs and logs, loading lorries and, occasionally, taking well-earned breaks. Despite the exhaustion, Vaughan found aesthetic values in his surroundings, enough to write about it to his friend, the painter Norman Towne:

…white and ochre branches plunging down into the oceanic surging of tangled nettles. People walking through the waist-high grass, through the aqueous leaf-green shadow, arms full of dead wood…and the wall running as an indefatigable horizontal, losing and finding itself in the jungle of weed and ivy…I wanted to capture this in lassoes of line and nets of colour, but it’s more difficult than writing about it. (Letter to Norman Towne, October 12, 1942)

The felled trees dwarf the men whose formidable task is carried out beneath a dark canopy of dense foliage described in translucent sepia ink washes. The walls are overgrown, here and there with ivy, in true Neo-Romantic style. On the walls and foreground passages Vaughan has used an orange tint. This has the effect of warming up what is a monochromatic, and somewhat menacing scene. The high wall surrounding the estate supplies the necessary geometrical stability from which to hang this composition. The lines describing the figures, with their rolled-up sleeves, overlay the tree boughs, indicating that they were added at a later stage.

S. G. L’Anson,
K. Seeley,
Anthony Hepworth Fine Art

Reid & Lefevre, London: Keith Vaughan: Works of Paper (1944)

Landscape with Workmen and Stones is painted with Vaughan’s characteristic wartime materials: pen and Indian ink, ochre gouache and highlights of white wax crayon. One of his most interesting techniques is washing diluted white gouache over darker areas of tone. In doing so he was able to achieve a wide variety of silvery qualities, while retaining evidence of the under-drawing.

At the time Vaughan painted this jewel-like gouache, he was under the influence of Graham Sutherland who suggested ways to approach landscape painting. He impressed on him that it was important to capture the character and atmosphere of landscape and not simply the appearance. Sutherland’s Black Landscape (1939/40) and Dark Hill, (1940), utilise both a comparable approach to subject and materials.This can be seen in both painters’ inky-wash treatment of the distant hills.

Vaughan’s use of Indian ink to scratch in forms, block in dark shadows and build up translucent areas of tone, which we also see in Landscape with Workmen and Stones, was something that Vaughan learnt form the older artist. 

Vaughan has imposed a structure on the Yorkshire limestonelandscape, while attempting to organise the forms into a coherentimage. He blocks in the houses and rocks and locks them into amethodically arranged composition. We see him imposing thisgeometricism on various works at this time (see Pickering Under Snow,(1945). In this he has looked at both Cézanne and the analyticalCubists.

Returning to a favourite theme of workmen, Vaughan includes twofigures at their labour. They not only inject a sense of narrative to thescene but also give the landscape scale – measured against the humanframe. It should be remembered that Vaughan’s experience of thisterrain was that of a labourer. He had been recently in engaged indigging trenches, filling sandbags, chopping trees and heaving stones aspart of his Non-Combatant army duties.

Vaughan’s later wartime landscapes go on to demonstrate anaffiliation with the work of Samuel Palmer. There is animprovisatory quality to the way he manages the forms and drawsin the various pictorial objects, as he gives up his more formalapproach to compositional organisation (see White House c. 1943).

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.

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.

Standing Figure, Standing Male Nude and Seated Male Nude are three of about half a dozen or so gouaches that Vaughan dated to1945. However, the style of his underlying drawing suggests that they were probably commenced earlier. As with Recruit Reading a Letter (1941), they have been reworked later. The autograph at the lower right of each gouache is in Vaughan’s later hand, which would confirm this.

Whenever Vaughan was presented with moments of privacy, which was rare in army life, he indulged himself and drew the male figure. He made many drawings like these and, by now, the male nude had become his central concern. Some of the drawings were made from his imagination and others were taken from photographs. Some were figure studies in which he explored new poses and attitudes, while others were of a more erotic character. It ought to be remembered that Vaughan was running a certain risk, since to be found with such drawings of nude men in his possession, especially while in the army, would have opened him up to dangerous criticism. This was a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence and blackmail was always a real threat. He amassed quite a collection of drawings:

15th June 1943: All day I have been sorting out my drawings and trying to classify them. Hundreds and hundreds of boys…They were all beginnings, always the first notes of things I hoped I would work out later. Some were just the spontaneous outburst released by a sensitive piece of paper from the mind’s storehouse. On such occasions the subject was always a nude boy. Oh how weary I am of all these boys – they are no longer so alive with a strange tormenting quality. I want to throw them all away, but dare not cast adrift completely from the last ten years. They are almost all I have to show, the few that were worked out into paintings are mostly figures. The drawings still have the feeling of the beginnings. Now they are mounted on sheets of white and brown paper, a hundred or more sheets and put into a portfolio I made to fit them.²⁰

He did, indeed, work up many of these drawings later. The characteristically spindly figures, of the physical type Vaughan was drawing at the start of the war, were fleshed out and given greater substance. With wax crayons and oil pastels he blocked in colours or added highlights. The detailed pen and ink descriptions of the forms were worked over with translucent pastels, creating interesting and varied textures. Backgrounds were darkened so as to press the figure forward more and make it stand out.

Vaughan’s use of oil pastels, which he discovered in America in 1959, suggests that these pictures were reworked after that date.

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²⁰ Journals, June 15, 1943

Gift from Vaughan to his friend the American artist Bernard Perlin (1918-2014)
Sir Jeffrey Tate

For the later part of the war Vaughan was stationed at Eden Camp, near Malton, in Yorkshire. Army life precluded him setting up a functioning studio in his barracks. Despite this significant limitation, he was determined to continue painting and reduced both the scale and the materials with which he worked. He produced a series of small paintings in gouache with additions of mixed media and described this combination as ‘ a volatile medium’ .

Vaughan’ s paintings from this period record his daily life in the army, the landscape around him and, occasionally, the activities of the local farmers, sowers and fruit-pickers. Schoolboys and young children also feature in his compositions, frequently accompanied by older figures, (see Yorkshire Lane with Figures, 1945, Orchard Scene with Boys Wrestling, 1945, Man and Child on the Moors, 1946). Here the two boys have been gathering fruit from the apple tree behind them. One has filled his wheelbarrow and the other holds his crop of fruit in his hands. An old man accompanies them, his walking stick in one hand as he raises up his other hand in surprise. All three have stopped in their tracks and look towards us, as though we have startled them. This viewer interaction is notable since it is an uncommon feature in Vaughan’ s work. The reason for it is explained in a letter from him to John Minton written from Eden Camp in July 1945:

Actually I’ ve been sparring around with some paintings lately. There’ s a wheelbarrow full of weeds and two people. The sun is shining. There is a gardener and two children in an orchard looking up at a passing train…here are the ochre and umber washes. Here comes the nervous sensitive line.

Translucent inky washes in the background contrast with the more detailed passages of drawing on the figures and tree. We are reminded of the ink drawings and paintings of trees and orchards by Samuel Palmer that were such an influence on the Neo-Romantic painters at this time. However, there is something more disturbing and unsettling in Vaughan’ s. Paintings such as An Orchard by the Railway contain neurotic atmospheres as though they represent scenes taken from a dream. The anxieties and uncertainties of the war, of course, add to this effect, as did Vaughan’ s troubled emotional life.

Sotheby’s, July 2008

Private Collection, U.K. (acquired from the above)

H. Gernshiem (1962),
K. Seeley,
Anthony Hepworth Fine Art

Whitechapel Gallery, London, Keith Vaughan, (1962) cat. no. 96

Orchard with Figure was shown in Vaughan’s Whitechapel retrospective in 1962. It appeared as no. 96 in the catalogue.

Vaughan produced a series of works around 1948/49 made variously in heavy, black outline and gouache. At this time he was making his first set of lithographs for Frances Byng Stamper and Caroline Lucas at the Millers Press in Lewes. It is probable that Orchard with a Figure, and other comparable paintings, such as Boys Picking Apples (1948), Green Pear Tree Figure (1948), Seated Boy in a Landscape (1948) and the handful of monotype prints, were trial runs or, in some way, related to that lithographic project. In each example Vaughan has employed the same material: black lithographic crayon and gouache. His oil on canvas House Beyond the Orchard (1948), with its pear trees at the left and farm house at the right, is also related to this work, despite the absence of a figure.

Figures in gardens, farms and orchards had featured in Vaughan’s work during the war while he was stationed first in the heart of Wiltshire countryside and, later, at Malton in Yorkshire. He filled pages of his sketchbooks with orchard studies and made several detailed gouaches of apple trees laden down with fruit (see p. 90 of Keith Vaughan: Journals and Drawings, 1966). Of course this motif originated in the work of Samuel Palmer in the early part of the Nineteenth century.The orchard, associated with the Garden of Eden and the notion of fecundity and plenty, subsequently figured in the work of Vaughan (see Orchard Scene with Wrestling Boys (1945), In the Orchard (1946) and Man Gathering Fruit (1948), as well as in the work of other Neo-Romantic artists including John Craxton and John Minton. 

Fruit pickers, stretching up into tree branches, provided Vaughan with an interesting formal pose. We see this repeated in several works around this time (see Bather Beneath a Branch (1947/8), Water, Trees and Figures II (1948), Pear Tree Bathers (original version), (1948) and The Lake with Bathers (1949).

The dominant design is made in waxy, black lithographic crayon. This is employed robustly in serrated, notched lines. There is the occasional use of rubbing with the flat side of the crayon to achieve dark tonal passages. This drawing technique is used in Vaughan’s lithographs The Woodsman, Winter Landscape and Man and Boat each executed the following year. There are also traces of white wax crayon on the bough of the tree and the legs and armpit of the figure. This is applied on top of the black lithographic crayon presumably to soften its effect. The boy’s facial features are picked out with delicate use of white pen and ink additions.

Vaughan has restricted his palette to yellow/green and orange and other related and diluted hues. Opaque patches of thick gouache alternate with more diluted use of the pigment – treated almost in themanner of a watercolour.

The model for Orchard with Figure was John McGuinness. They hadrecently met at Pagham, where Vaughan occasionally went after thewar. Not knowing his parents, McGuinness had been brought up as anorphan in Liverpool by priests. He had worked in hotels and groceryshops and he and Vaughan soon began an affair. In some waysMcGuinness replaced Vaughan’s younger brother Dick, who had beenkilled in the war, seven years earlier. He was kitted out in Dick’sclothes, taught how to cook, had his manners improved and wasgenerally ‘brought on’.

The working-class, ill-educated McGuinness, with his large hands andathletic body, represented something raw and honest and embodied allthe qualities that attracted Vaughan. His gentle, unaffected and openheartedcharacter allied him with nature, in Vaughan’s imagination, andwe find his broad, broken nose, dark fringe and rugged appearance inseveral works at this time. For example, he posed for Seated Boy in aLandscape (1948), Fishermen at Mevagissey (1948), The Woodsmanlithograph (1949), made the following year, and Nude Study (1951),made a little later.

Private Collection U.K.

Private Collection, U.K.

Private Collection, UK

Ruth Holden (née Lynam)
Private collection

Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1957
Leicester Galleries, London

These three drawings are studies for ‘Seated Figure, 1951’ that was in the collection of the late Peter Meyer, a great Vaughan collector and subsequently sold at auction in 2008.

These dimensions are the overall measurement for all three drawings

Agnew’ s, London, 1990
Private Collection, UK

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.

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 inadvertising 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)

Victoria Zinovieff
Gordon Hargreaves
Private collection, U.K.
Gordon Hargreaves and John Ball
The Honourable Hugh Davies
Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath
Private collection, U.K.

Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work, Constable, London, 1990, pl. 13 (ill.col.)
Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, p. 70, cat. no. AH106 (ill.col.)
Philip Vann & Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2012, p. 45 (pl. 38, ill.col.)

London, Lefevre Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Gouaches, 1951
Edinburgh, British Arts Council, 8 Young Contemporary British Painters, 1951
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Hatton Gallery (University of Durham), Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, 1956, cat. no. 11
Bristol, Royal West of England Academy, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, 1958
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, 1962, cat. no. 123
London, The Piccadilly Gallery, February 1965
Sheffield, Mappin Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, 1969, cat. no. 3
Sheffield, Sheffield City Art Galleries, British Painting 1900-1960, November – December 1975, cat. no. 178
London, Geffrye Museum, Keith Vaughan: Images of Man, 1981; travelled to Birmingham, City Museum and Art Gallery, cat. no. 15 (ill. p. 34)
London, Olympia, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings, 2002, no. 428
Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, 2007, cat. no. 8 (ill. p. 19)

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

Redfern Gallery, London, 1978

Michael Bestall

Osborne Samuel, London, 2007

Private Collection, U.K.

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p.69, no. AH103 (where titled: Theseus II: Study for ‘Discovery’)

Redfern Gallery, London, 1978

Osborne Samuel Gallery, London, 2007, cat. no. 8 (co. ill. pp.32-33)

In a spirit of post-war optimism, the Festival of Britain opened in May 1951 on the South Bank in London and attracted eight and a half million visitors over the course of five months. The celebration of the nation’s contribution to science, technology and the arts was supported by the Arts Council. The festival offered an opportunity for the public to see what the new generation of creative artists, designers and architects could contribute to post-war regeneration. The centrepiece of the festival was the enormous Dome of Discovery, the interior of which was divided into a series of display zones dedicated to national innovation and ingenuity. By way of interconnecting walkways, bridges and escalators, visitors could explore the impact made by Britain in mapping and charting the globe, exploring the heavens and investigating the structures of the universe. Since many of the imposing exhibits were viewed across the dome’s cavernous interior, huge display spaces were required and an army of graphic designers, typographers and artists were marshalled to produce colourful backdrops and murals to set them off. Along with Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Michael Ayrton, Julian Trevelyan, John Minton and many others, Vaughan was asked to provide
a large-scale work for the festival site.

Named after the dome itself, Vaughan’s immense mural Discovery was positioned prominently within it. It was three and a half meters high and seventeen meters across and given the epithet At the Beginning of Time. It was an allegorical painting, designed to illustrate a central premise of the exhibition that Britain had historically been a civilizing force in the world and continued to be so. It was the largest work Vaughan painted and its immense size made it almost impossible to photograph. Consequently, no adequate visual record has been located of either the final version or its positioning inside the dome. To gain any understanding of its impact in terms of design, colour and composition, we must rely on examining surviving studies such as these two oil panels, part of an extensive series of preparatory works he made. The mural was destroyed at the end of the festival when the dome was demolished.

Vaughan’s imagery encapsulates various moments in man’s evolutionary history – emerging from the forest, harnessing fire, and setting off to discover new lands. It is an essentially optimistic view of mankind, filled with a range of expressive, gestures and poses. The subject provided him with the opportunity not only depict the male nude in a landscape setting, but also infuse the composition with drama and theatrical effects.

Osborne Samuel, London

Man with a Chair probably started out as one of Vaughan’ s many life drawings. Around this time he was teaching painting and illustration at the Central School of Art and had access to a life studio and full-time model. The formal stance, the chair and the model’ s posing pouch might indicate this. He produced many comparable gouaches of nude models, and in an interview given a few years later, he defended his relentless obsession with this subject:

These compositions rely on the assumption (hard to justify perhaps, but none the less real to me) that the human figure, the nude, is still a valid symbol for the expression of man’ s aspirations and reactions to the life of his time.

(Keith Vaughan: Painter’ s Progress, ‘ Studio’ , August, 1958)

It is clear that much of Vaughan’ s interest here is in the articulation of the human form and how the limbs of the human body occupy and move through space. We sense muscular tension in the anatomical curves and arcs and a tangible weightiness in the volumes. Each stage of the picture making process is retained in the final image – the pen and ink observation marks, the gouache tonal in-fills and the suggestions of light and shade to add solidity to the form.

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

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

Keith Vaughan: A Retrospective Exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1962, (pl. xxvii)
Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, cat. no. 163, p. 86

London, Leicester Galleries, Keith Vaughan: Paintings, 1953, cat. no. 7
London, Olympia, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings, 26 February – 3 March 2002, no. 431
Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Keith Vaughan, Figure and Landscape, 3 February – 25 March 2007, cat. no. 17

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.

Thomas Agnew & Sons, London
Agnew’s, London
Offer Waterman, London
Private Collection, U.K.

Osborne Samuel, Keith Vaughan: Image and Anxiety, exh. cat. p. 86 (ill.col.)

London, Osborne Samuel, Keith Vaughan: Image and Anxiety, 10 May – 09 June, 2023

Vaughan was in the habit of producing more than one version of the same subject while trying to work out compositional and formal qualities in his paintings. In 1953, for example, he made two oil paintings of The Bar, each quite distinctive, though related in colour, mood and subject. This gouache is a study, made the year before he painted those two oil paintings and equally idiosyncratic.

The scene depicts three men in a bar with the barman at the right. The pub can be identified as The Black Horse by the words, in reverse, on the window sign behind them. One man, at the left, downs his pint.

Another, in the centre, is half way through his drink, while the third smokes his pipe and appears to have consumed one drink too many. This was a time when men wore ties to go out, smoked in pubs and drank as much as they could inside the strict licensing hours.

Vaughan offers us a bleak, colourless scene and certainly not one that we would associate with the fabled accounts of sizzling Bohemian culture. Tambimuttu, the editor of Poetry London, claims to
have coined the name ‘Fitzrovia’ after The Fitzroy Tavern. It was a world haunted by such literary
figures as George Orwell and Dylan Thomas in the
1930s. During the 1940s and ’50s the arts crowd, now including Francis Bacon, Colquhoun and MacBryde, John Minton and John Craxton, were hanging out in the lesser-known pubs such as The Wheatsheaf, The French House, The Burglar’s Rest, The Marquis of Granby, the fabled Colony Room and The Black Horse in Rathbone Place. Vaughan drank there with his housemates John Minton and Alan Ross.

The Black Horse pulled its first pint in 1809 and has continued to serve beer for over two hundred years. The chartists had met in the private rooms during the nineteenth century and Karl Marx made a speech there to a packed pub. It has a main bar and a series of upstairs rooms where different groups congregated. By the time Vaughan drank there it was regarded, by those ‘in the know’, as a discreet ‘queer bar’ where you could meet people; Quentin Crisp, among others drank there.Recently The Black Horse was bought by London & Central Estates from Mitchells & Butlers for £1.95m and is now known as Byron at theBlack Horse. It proudly serves ‘Proper Hamburgers’ to tourists.

We could be forgiven for expecting a scene in a Soho pub to be ajovial, cheerful affair. Instead, however, Vaughan presents us with five pale, ghost-like figures sitting in silence around the bar in an atmosphere of dark ennui. They do not communicate, converse or glance at one another as they sit, lost in their separate, sombre alcohol-fuelled thoughts. Vaughan was working well within a tradition when he painted The Bar. British artists from William Hogarth to Edward Burra had depicted figures in alehouses in an attempt to convey something of the human condition and the follies of the soul. We are, perhaps, reminded in this case more of Van Gogh’s nightmarish The Night Café (1888):

In my picture of the Night Café I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public house.^³⁶ 

Vaughan’s monochromatic use of colour and murky palette communicates something of the sadness, isolation and detachment of the men sitting round the bar with their half-empty lives and their half- consumed pints. He is careful to place the viewer at one end of the baras we, in turn wait to be served in this macabre public house.

³⁶ Vincent van Gogh, letter to his brother Theo, September 9, 1888

Leicester Galleries, London, 1955

E.P. Ortweiler

Christie’s, 30 May 1997, lot 49

Private Collection, U.K.

London, Leicester Galleries, Keith Vaughan, February 1955, cat. no. 53

London, Olympia, Keith Vaughan, 26 February – 3 March 2002 

Ruth Holden (née Lynam), London
Private Collection, UK

Osborne Samuel, Keith Vaughan, Paintings and Drawings , 24 May – 23 June 2007, No. 37 p.61 (illus)

Piccadilly Gallery, London, 1969

Acrobats is a light-hearted image in terms of its imagery and the manner in which it is constructed, something not altogether common in Vaughan’ s work. Strangely, we view the two figures from behind as they totter away from us, one precariously balancing on his unsteady companion’ s shoulders. The supporting figure is described tonally with the light source coming from the left, while the upper figure is rendered emphatically flat, without any light or shade. Other pictorial discrepancies add to the visual wit. For example, while the comical duo is depicted figuratively and monochromatically, the setting is completely abstract and conjured up in a colourful visual language. The white leg of the upper figure merges into the arm of the supporting figure, as though they are a single form. Vaughan is economical in his choice of earthy ochres and umbers but to enliven the effect he has added a pale blue lozenge at the upper right and included a cobalt blue rectangle next to the figures.

We ask ourselves, who are these amusing characters? Where are they going and what are they doing? They seem to tolerate an absurd and precarious relationship, like Estragon and Vladimir in Beckett’ s Waiting for Godot . It comes as little surprise to learn that the play was premiered in English the same year Vaughan painted this gouache.

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

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.

R N Kershaw, Wargrave
Leicester Galleries, London
Private Collection
Prof. John Ball
Private Collection
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel Gallery

John Rothenstein, British Art since 1900, Phaidon, London, 1962 (pl.150)
Philip Vann & Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan, Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2012 p.16 no. 9 (ill.)
Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012 p.107 no. AH260 (ill.)
Gerard Hastings, Visions and Recollections , Pagham Press, 2014, (ill.), Cat. No. 101.

Leicester Galleries, London, 1958, Keith Vaughan – Recent Paintings (no.23)
Menier Gallery, London, Clough & Vaughan: Visions and Recollections, 2014

Nude Against a Rock is one of Vaughan’s more resolved depictions of the male form. Possessing a thorough knowledge of Ancient Greek art, it is Vaughan’s homage to the statuary of the Classical period, which developed the harmonious proportions he so admired in sculpture. He has positioned the figure in a contrapposto pose whereby the weight is supported mainly on one leg, while the other is more relaxed. In the upper torso the opposite arm is in tension, holding his staff behind, while the corresponding arm hangs free. This has the effect of tilting both the hips and the shoulders and gently enlivens, what would otherwise be, a static figure. Placing him slightly to the left and twisting his head to the right, augments this delicate animation and generates a sense of tranquillity and repose. 

In the distance, an ominous sky and dark trees frame the figure and, in the foreground, an imposing rock presses upon him. Vaughan offers us no information as to who this vulnerable youth is or why he stands here in this barren, rocky terrain. The intentional omission of facial features precludes identification or character analysis. Similarly, the absence of clothing prevents us making judgements about his social status or identity. By approaching the human form in this way Vaughan discourages us from imposing narrative associations and, consequently, the figure is universalised. While he may not be identifiable, we do know who the model was. Vaughan had met Johnny Walsh in the Black Horse pub in Soho the year before. He recorded their meeting in his journal.

January 8, 1956: Unforeseen encounter on New Year’s Eve with Johnny Walsh. L’Archange of Jean Genet. Captivating face of a young boxer. I invited him to come & let me draw him sometime. He finally arrived one afternoon last week. His clothes, all of which he at once took off, assuming that to be my wish, were either stolen or given to him. He gave me full details of his life. Brought up apparently in a perfectly respectable working-class family. Became involved with a car-stealing gang, ran a small-scale brothel (‘only 10/- a time’) & was finally caught & sentenced for petty larceny. Is now just released & has ‘no fixed address’ as the police would say. Lives by pickpocketing. All this he told me sitting naked beside the stove in my studio.

One of the most notable qualities of Nude Against a Rock is Vaughan’s treatment of the anatomy. It is broken down into small facets and angled planes of colour applied, for the most part, with a flat-ended brush. An array of blocked-in but related, fleshy tints of ochre, yellow and orange describe the articulation of the athletic figure. The more neutralised hues of the setting serves to frame this flame-like human presence.

Keith Vaughan, from whom purchased by Dr Harwood Stevenson
Mrs Elizabeth Corob

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p.108, no. AH269 

London, Matthiesen Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Recent Paintings, 1960, cat. no. 44

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Keith Vaughan: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1962, cat. no. 232  (lent by Dr Harwood Stevenson)

Over the course of the 1950s alone Vaughan produced no fewer than twenty-five paintings which carry the title ‘Bather.’ In this example a naked youth reaches towards the left edge of the canvas while his other arm hangs by his side. The pose has the effect of stabilizing him as he locates his centre of gravity, formally locking him into position within the composition. At the upper right, vestiges of an arm reach upwards, evidence of a previous pictorial decision. Its lingering presence indicates how Vaughan was intent on retaining each stage of the painting’s creation in its final state. Despite his youth and obvious athleticism, the subject remains unsteady, awkward and unsure of himself. Nevertheless, the absence of other figures or identifying landmarks lends him a distinctly monumental presence. Far from being a heroic representation of the male nude, this bather conveys a quality of brooding resignation.

In many of Vaughan’s paintings of single figures we sense his inclination to camouflage and veil certain physical aspects of the human form. Genitals, pubic hair, facial features and other anatomical parts are customarily absented by means of an abstracting, formalizing process. He was completely aware of what he was doing and referred to both facial features and genitals as ‘the attention grabbers.’ In a letter to the writer E. M. Forster, he explained how he resolved and overcame one of the central problems facing the painter of the male nude:

If one uses the image of the human figure one must start by making it erotic – because that’s the first thing that strikes you about it. But the erotic image soon ceases to be human and you paint the eroticism out. You don’t just castrate it with mock decencies but transpose it into the flat plastic language of form and colour which has its own needs and limitations (Keith Vaughan, unpublished letter to E. M. Forster, April 18, 1962).

J. Holt

Whitechapel Catalogue: Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, 1962. Plate LXIV

1960: Bear Lane Gallery, cat. no. 2.

Amacuzac is a city in Mexico in the state of Morelos. In 1959 Vaughan had been invited to Iowa as Resident Painter at the State University and, after his duties there had been attended to, went travelling in Mexico. In June he met a young man called Raul, a sandal maker who had eleven brothers and sisters and who lived in Amacuzac, about thirty kilometres away. They embarked on a short but passionate affair that was terminated only by Vaughan’s departure.

Nevertheless they continued to write letters to each other for six years, but inevitably their communications became less frequent and eventually died away. The memory of Raul, the boy from Amacuzac, remained with Vaughan and he recalled his gentle, tender presence in his later journals. This painting, as was often the case with Vaughan, was a way of dealing, or coming to terms with, a significant event in is life.

Raul from Amacuzac. Photographs, from Vaughan’s Journal, Vol. 42 

The business and bustle of a Mexican market place is communicated in the complex gouache painting. The open, loose brushwork and improvisatory drawing style retains the freshness of a sketch while capturing the complexity of the jostling human forms. A characteristic of Vaughan’s mature style is the manner in which he overlays and superimposes form on tangled form, interweaving them into their surrounding environment. This interpenetration of the advancing procession of figures is both dramatic and arresting. Perhaps the foreground figure, with his lynx-like eyes, is a quasi-portrait of Raul.

As ever with Vaughan’s so-called gouaches, he has actually employed a combination of materials. Rapidly brush-in Indian ink provides the underpinning drawing of the pictorial forms, while the gouache pigment supplies patches and slabs of colour. Crayons and wax resists, visible on the standing figure at the left, help to build up rich surface texture. The oil pastels that he had recently discovered in Iowa provide a richer, denser surface than hitherto. Vaughan’s harmonious palette, consisting of golden ochres, browns, creams and coffee-coloured patches of pigment, creates an unusual pictorial effect, at once exotic and sensuous.

Vaughan’s handwritten label on the back of his archive photograph A recently discovered photograph of another gouache, from Vaughan’s personal record archive, is linked to this work. The inscription on the reverse of it is in Vaughan’s hand and names the picture as Landscape with Figures Walking. It is less considered than Amacuzac – Group of Figures and is handled in a more summary fashion. Nevertheless there are obvious and striking similarities between the two works.

Vaughan discusses Raul frequently in his private journals:

June, 1959: 
His broad flat strong brown face, like something between a Mayan sculpture & a Murillo boy. The slanting eyes. Brown nose. Thick lips. And by contrast the childishness of his body, arms, hands. Delicate & fragile looking.

June 25, 1959: 
Amacuzac. A place where lives one of the dearest human beings I know. 

June 26, 1959: 
Who, in Amacuzac, could appreciate the qualities he has to offer.

June 27/28, 1959: 
Raul in Amacuzac. Good Night little boy. Forgive the tears I made you shed. 

June 29, 1959: 
Raul in Amacuzac. Three or four times a day his memory comes back. It is like trying to keep in sight a little toy kite which has drifted away in the wind. Its isolation & loneliness becomes sadder & sadder, but its existence increasingly more difficult to identify. What is he doing? What will become of him? 

July 15, 1959: 
Wrote to Raul begging him to write. I only want some confirmation that he did exist, that the whole thing was real…Three weeks ago Raul & I were at the Vista Hermosa. 3 weeks. It is incredible. It seems further away than childhood. A past life. 

July 26, 1959: 
Raul wrote, 2 letters, of a shattering, childish sadness & tenderness, which took me a whole day to decipher& left me numb with misery. He says he is ill, weeps for me, will never see me again. Both letters say the same thing & are interspersed with small requests for one dollar, a pair of trousers, photograph of London & one of myself. He enclosed also a photograph of himself.

Acquired directly from the artist

Marlborough Gallery

Private Collection, France

Osborne Samuel, London

Massey & Hepworth, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, p.123, cat no. AH326

London, Whitechapel Gallery, Retrospective Keith Vaughan, March – April 1962, no.265
London, Olympia, February – March 2002, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings,  n° KV 282
Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, February –  March 2007, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, no.30, ill. p.32

From the later 1950s, Vaughan painted landscapes without figures that verged towards complete abstraction: works in which colour is tessellated into compositions structured by more or less geometrical units. The impetus was light and colour, whether experienced abroad, in France, Greece, Italy and Iowa (where he held a residency), or nearer to home, in London, Dorset, Essex, Northumbria, Wales and Ireland. Landscape would be internalised and re-presented, sometimes leaving vestiges of buildings, trees, snow or hills, sometimes just the trace of these elements through their seasonal timbre. Vaughan described the process and its consequences in his working notes:

Particles of landscape which detach themselves float out into space – continuing a foreground plane against a distant one. Floating particles of landscape create a vivid sense of space … Small floating squares and rectangles. They might equally be leaves or scraps of paper. This is unimportant. Their identity will be determined by their circumstances. ₁

This return to ‘pure landscape’ was noted and commended by Edwin Mullins, reviewing Vaughan’s  large-scale retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1962. ‘Among the best of the recent work’, wrote Mullins, ‘were those in the spirit of the early landscapes; paintings inspired by travel and places, full of atmosphere and effects of light, and painted in the warm, sombre colours of the earth.’² Landscape (1960) was one such work. A source in landscape is hard to detect, yet the composition splinters light and autumnal warmth into a patchwork of lines and blocks, counterpointed by a continuum of hazy blue-greys.

₁ Keith Vaughan, ‘Notes of the Process of Painting and Diary of Work in Progress’; quoted in Keith Vaughan: Myth, Mortality and the Male Figure, exhibition catalogue (London: Osborne Samuel, 2019), p. 36

² Edwin Mullins, ‘Vaughan Reconsidered’, Apollo, Vol. 26, No. 3 (May 1962), p. 219.

Private Collection, UK

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.

Dr Patrick Woodcock, by whom gifted to the present owner
Private Collection, Ireland
Osborne Samuel London

Vaughan was familiar with Worbarrow Bay on the Isle of Purbeck and painted several works inspired by its craggy, limestone cliffs (see Purbeck Landscape 1963; Small Limestone Landscape, 1963 and Black Purbeck Landscape, 1964). The coastline is popular with sea divers, not least because of the dramatic underwater boulders and gullies and the wreck of a barge off Worbarrow Tout. The present work was inspired by an incident from the previous year. In the summer of 1963, Vaughan drove down to the Jurassic Coast specifically to hunt for new subjects. While sitting having a drink at the Swanage Hotel, he recorded in his journal an encounter with some sea divers that morning:

We drove down on Saturday through hideous traffic until at Romney we cut adrift & took byways through the New Forest. Blissful Isolation & open roads. Beer & Sandwiches at a little pub. There were perfect moments – the first view of Chapman’s Pool on Sunday morning, crossing the stubbly field near the farm, the low stone wall. And then the sudden unsuspected drop away & the bay far below, nearly deserted, china blue.

The scramble down – knee-breaking. So much further than it looks, the distances always deceptive in this landscape which was made for Mastodons. Then the group of skin divers which appeared from outer space, peeling on their incredibly erotic, skin tight rubbers, crutch piece, belt of lead, leggings, top piece, helmet & goggles. Then they set off face down on the water, dozens at a time, only their red periscopes showing. (Keith Vaughan, Journal XLIV – supplement, Swanage, July 29-31, 1963).

The group of figures are preparing for their dive. The standing, foreground figure, complete with flippers and swimming trunks, dominates the composition. Arms raised, he prepares to ‘peel on’ his gear. His friends stand or sit on a rock close by. The neutral palette indicates a grey overcast day and the patches of black and splashes of paint evoke the rubbery squelch of their diving suits. Areas of collage and hand-rendered lettering (these are not unknown elsewhere in Vaughan’s more improvisatory gouaches) can also be seen and add to the texture and inventive quality of the imagery.

Gerard Hastings

Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London

Christie’s, June 1991

Roberto Ceriani, U.S.A. (acquired from the above)

Redfern Gallery, London 

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above) 

Osborne Samuel, London

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

Gerard Hastings

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

The Artist’s Estate

Austin Desmond Fine Art, London

Private Collection, U.K.

Philip Vann & Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan, Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2012, p. 127, no. 130 (ill.)

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co. Bristol, 2012, p.173 no.AH502 (ill.)

Austin Desmond Fine Art, London, 1989, p. 31 no. 98 (ill.)

Agnew’s Gallery, London, 1990, no. 26

Vaughan painted two versions of Village After Sunset in 1968. Unfortunately, in neither did he supply pictorial clues, such as a church steeple or any identifying markers to help us locate which particular village he had in mind. It is most likely a generic conception of an Essex village close by Toppesfield, where he lived. Pictorial attention in both works is atmospheric rather than topographical. The glow of summer evening sunlight shimmers and glances off innumerable surfaces, some, perhaps architectural, others more organic. The effect is a dazzling array of prismatic colour. His tendency to fracture and break up landscape elements into quilt-like patterns at this time is, of course, derived from Cézanne and Analytical Cubism, though Vaughan’s palette is more succulent and sensuous. 

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

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 Hon. Hugh Davies

Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath

Private Collection, U.K.

Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan, His Life and Work, Constable & Co., London, 1990, pl. 47 (col.)

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p.177, no. AH514

Bath, Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Keith Vaughan: Paintings, 1995

London, Olympia, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings, 2002, no.390

Vaughan visited San Giorgio on the Greek island of Corfu on several occasions accompanied by his friend Patrick Woodcock and the theatre designer Gladys Calthrop. His final visit was in August 1969 just before he started work on this painting. His journal says he bathed several times at San Giorgio before heading to Paxos to visit the actor Peter Bull who had a house there. It was a rare moment of unfettered joy for him.

Only 24 hours since I arrived. How differently I feel. Tensions, anxieties, depression completely vanished. In the sea this morning at San Giorgio, lifted & buffeted by the heavy fuming sea, it occurred to me that for the first time in years I felt simply happy to be alive. I must remember this. It is so good to feel happy again without anything changing inside, simply a different environment – just a manic mood? Perhaps. (Journals, Aug 29, 1969)

While bathing, he met up with a dark-haired boy named Nikos and a blond boy called Jerry, who showed him the best beaches away from tourists. They made friends and accompanied him throughout the holiday, lunching and dining together. Undoubtedly the two figures in the painting are representations of them. They stand on the sand, coloured towels in hand, before a pile of rocks and a troubled sky.

Waddington Galleries, London

Professor J. N. Ball

Private Collection, U.K.

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p.178, no. AH519

London, Waddington Galleries, Keith Vaughan: New Paintings, 1973

Glasgow, Compass Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Gouaches, 1976 (no. 5)

London, Austin/Desmond, A Selection of Work, 1987

Vaughan painted the Essex landscape over the course of two decades. Mortimer’s Farm is situated a few miles southwest of Harrow Hill cottage. As the title suggests, Copse by Mortimer’s II was his second attempt at depicting agricultural buildings viewed through the small woodland area between his house and the local farm. The first version caused such problems that he painted over it five years later.

The late Essex paintings are generally small and intimate in conception. They contain little human activity, nor do they depict picturesque subjects customarily found in landscape paintings. The area around Harrow Hill is lacking in scenic hills, rivers or other traditionally picturesque features. The rolling, hedge-less farmland is interrupted only by agricultural buildings, wooded coppices, and some notable medieval barns. It was precisely this unspectacular quality that attracted him:

A landscape must be familiar otherwise I only see the superficial dramatic aspects that any other sightseer sees. The ones that have revealed the most to me are the ones outside the window of my studio. Trees & sky & some man-made objects such as a house – that is enough to start the reaction. A landscape can only be measured by its remoteness from, & similarity to, human beings. But they must be as remote as the landscape is remote, however familiar & visible. What I like best is a small, compact, unspectacular landscape, combining as much of the three basic elements – air, earth & water – within a space not so large that I couldn’t walk around it in half & hour (Keith Vaughan, unpublished and undated studio notes, c. 1959).

The application of the pigment is rich and varied, in places flat and opaque and in others, more translucent. Gestural brush strokes act as an equivalent of dried tree bark or the texture of desiccated, autumnal foliage. They create the quality of flux across the surface of the panel. Some forms appear to advance towards the viewer, while others recede into the distance. For example, the creamy ochres act as a foreground space and the colder, ultramarine blues retreat into the distance. To achieve a sense of space Vaughan has flattened the landscape elements into overlapping planes and blocks of organic shapes. Gradually we become aware of bending boughs, brushwood, distant vegetation and patches of blue sky, glimpsed through the thicket and undergrowth. Vaughan has not attempted to reproduce how the eye perceives the scene but paints the experience of moving though the woodland towards Mortimer’s farm.

Private Collection, U.K.

Out to Pasture is a late gouache that Vaughan painted at Harrow Hill. It comes from a group of gouaches, all produced in 1973, which depicts rural Essex scenes of horses and cattle. Some of these were shown at Victor Waddington’s gallery in 1974 in the exhibition, Keith Vaughan: Paintings in Gouaches.

During the summer months Vaughan liked to work with gouache. Being water-based it dried more quickly in warmer weather and work could proceed at a pace. Unlike oil painting, gouache is an immediate and spontaneous medium that requires rapid application and sure execution. When he was in the right creative mood he embarked one of his ‘gouache marathons’, working for days on end on several pieces simultaneously, until a dozen or so paintings were completed. Vaughan would spread the sheets of paper out to dry on the wooden floorboards of his studio as he moved from painting to painting, using up his pre-mixed colours and oil pastels. Out to Pasture is one such painting that was produced alongside at least three other gouaches. These include Two Figures with Cow and farm Building (c. 1973), Landscape with Cow and Farm Building (c. 1973), and Landscape with Animals (c. 1973). The similar colour, scale, paper, handling and style of these works, naturally group them together.

Vaughan’s gouache painting vocabulary, at this time, is varied in its speckled textures and his brushwork is gestural, with the freshness of an improvisation. Patches of coloured oil pastels were often applied after the pigment had dried, and these sing out from the dark and sombre surface.

Out to Pasture, with its easy-going bucolic rhythm of farm animals grazing and moving from left to right, is a gentle, un-dramatic vision of the countryside. Its origins may be traced right back to the pastoral visions of William Blake and Samuel Palmer. In the far distance the gable end of an agricultural outhouse can be made out, and the black patches, denoting windows and doors, is also economically and wittily employed as the brinded markings on the animals.

Vaughan demonstrates a new economy of means in representing the idyllic, rustic life going on around his country cottage where he had spent much of his time recuperating from ill health. Figures are scaled down to simple silhouettes and constructed with the minimal use of inky outline. Without resorting to the deceptions of linear or aerial perspective, Vaughan achieves the impact of pictorial depth while managing to retain the integrity of the painted surface. Opaque lozenges of colour and massed-up areas of texture effortlessly evoke distant buildings, far-off woodlands and prospects. Foreground farms are arranged into abstract patches and open green fields where animals graze. 

One particularly interesting and characteristic technique of Vaughan’s is admirably demonstrated in Out to Pasture at the lower right. This curious watery frothing first appears in the early 1950s. The technique is not easy to achieve since bubbles created by rapid movement of the brush rupture on drying and result in a flattened tone. Vaughan accidently discovered an innovative method to arrest the foamy gouache texture and prevent it from bursting before it dried. It seems he was careless one day while cleaning his brushes in the studio sink and traces of detergent remained on one of them. When he resumed work the next day his gouache paint began to froth as he agitated the wet brush over the surface of the paper. Since the viscosity of the paint had been strengthened by the presence of the detergent, the curious bubbling effect remained even after the gouache dried.55 As Vaughan refined the technique he discovered that, Vinegar in the water makes the ink precipitate, [however it] stings the skin.⁵⁶

⁵⁵ Taken from conversations with Dr. Gordon Hargreaves and G. H.

⁵⁶ Journals: February 26, 1965

Private Collection, U.K.

Austin/Desmond, London, 2006

Private Collection, U.K.

In a spirit of post-war optimism, the Festival of Britain opened in May 1951 on the South Bank in London and attracted eight and a half million visitors over the course of five months. The celebration of the nation’s contribution to science, technology and the arts was supported by the Arts Council. The festival offered an opportunity for the public to see what the new generation of creative artists, designers and architects could contribute to post-war regeneration. The centrepiece of the festival was the enormous Dome of Discovery, the interior of which was divided into a series of display zones dedicated to national innovation and ingenuity. By way of interconnecting walkways, bridges and escalators, visitors could explore the impact made by Britain in mapping and charting the globe, exploring the heavens and investigating the structures of the universe. Since many of the imposing exhibits were viewed across the dome’s cavernous interior, huge display spaces were required and an army of graphic designers, typographers and artists were marshalled to produce colourful backdrops and murals to set them off. Along with Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Michael Ayrton, Julian Trevelyan, John Minton and many others, Vaughan was asked to provide a large-scale work for the festival site.

Named after the dome itself, Vaughan’s immense mural Discovery was positioned prominently within it. It was three and a half meters high and seventeen meters across and given the epithet At the Beginning of Time. It was an allegorical painting, designed to illustrate a central premise of the exhibition that Britain had historically been a civilizing force in the world and continued to be so. It was the largest work Vaughan painted and its immense size made it almost impossible to photograph. Consequently, no adequate visual record has been located of either the final version or its positioning inside the dome. To gain any understanding of its impact in terms of design, colour and composition, we must rely on examining surviving studies such as these two oil panels, part of an extensive series of preparatory works he made. The mural was destroyed at the end of the festival when the dome was demolished.

Vaughan’s imagery encapsulates various moments in man’s evolutionary history – emerging from the forest, harnessing fire, and setting off to discover new lands. It is an essentially optimistic view of mankind, filled with a range of expressive, gestures and poses. The subject provided him with the opportunity not only depict the male nude in a landscape setting, but also infuse the composition with drama and theatrical effects.

Private Collection, U.K.

This painting admirably demonstrates the confidence with which Vaughan was handling the medium of gouache in the 1960s. Gone are the scratched lines, the nervous drawing technique and the over-abundance of incidental detail, seen in his early works. By now Vaughan had acquired a real authority in his use of gouache, his figural placement and his compositions skills. As a result, a more monumental style emerged, economical in both pictorial incident and use of colour.

By the 1960s Vaughan attained a critical balance between the value of the paint and the significance of the subject matter; hitherto figuration had always retained the upper hand. His gouaches now possessed equilibrium between the representation of the object and the vehicle of its expression, namely the stuff with which it was painted. He was in complete control of the medium and in an interview given at this time he mentioned this point:

If there is a fault with one of my gouaches, I know it is my fault; but if there is a fault with one of my oils, I console myself with the idea that it is the paint’s fault.⁵⁴  

Here Vaughan demonstrates an economy of means in representing the human figure and welds it to its setting. Figures are scaled down to simple silhouettes and constructed with the minimal use of inky outline. They inhibit their own psychological world and move through space with the carefully choreographed grace of dancers. They stretch and reach out with their limbs in a melancholic pavane; the central figure touches the left and lower edge of the picture plane, as if to hold and fasten himself in place. This was a device that Vaughan used frequently and it can be seen, for example, in Two Figures (Damson)
(1964/66) and Figure (1961). In each of these paintings the human frame is abridged and streamlined in a comparable way to the gouache. Vaughan distilled the male nude, describing it in sombre colours and fixing it in place with the tautness of tent pegs and guy ropes.

Two Figures (Damson), 1964/66

Without resorting to the deceptions of linear or aerial perspective, Vaughan achieves the impact of pictorial depth. He tilts, flattens and layers coloured planes to convey a sense of air, space, and distance between the forms. 

Perhaps one of Vaughan’s most recognisable formal traits is his homogenous approach to colour. This quality can be traced back to his wartime painting when pigments were restricted and he had to increase his palette as best he could. Here he has selected a base colour of Raw Umber and, perhaps, a touch of olive green, then modulated them by adding more and more white pigment to achieve a range of lighter, but related hues and tints. Conversely, by gradually adding small measures of Indian ink to the base colour, his values have progressed in the opposite tonal direction. The process has produced harmonious relationships between the colour chords and contributes to the satisfying chromatic organisation.

_______________________________

⁵⁴ Interview with Oswell Blakeston, ‘Keith Vaughan’, Arts Review 4, 1965

Colonel John Jenner
Agnew’s, London
Private Collection, U.K.

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

The Artist’s Estate
The Belgrave Gallery , 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

Private Collection, U.K.

Redfern Gallery, 1949, Les Peintres-Graveurs Exposition du I December au 31 Decembre 1949: English Lithographs and Monotypes in Colour with a foreword by Philip James. Cat No. 206 catalogues as ‘Landscape’

Private Collection U.K.

Redfern Gallery / Jan-Feb 1986, British Prints:The Post-War Years 1945-1960, with essay by Gordon Samuel, Cat No 111 in b/w

Redfern Gallery, Summer Exhibition 1951, June-August 1951 (Including a selection of prints by The Society of London Painter-Printers), Cat No. 786

Private Collection, U.K.

London, Redfern Gallery, 1953-54 Russian Émigré Artists in Paris, English Artists (Included 188 prints by British Artists), December 1953 – January 1954, Cat. No. 350

Private Collection, U.K.

Redfern Gallery, French and English Colour Lithographs, November-December 1951, Cat. No.213
The Arts Council of great Britain, 1951, Contemporary British Lithographs, Catalogue of 30 lithographs with an introduction by Edwin la Dell, Cat. No. 30

Peter Adam

Private Collection, U.K.

The New Art Centre, London,
Sotheby’s London,
Private collection

Vaughan spent the winter of 1941 under canvas before moving into the comparative luxury of Nissen huts in January 1942. The weather conditions had been freezing, damp and cold. The tents were cramped and over-crowded and there was no personal privacy. Despite this, Vaughan discovered something that had been missing from his life. At this time he wrote in his journal, after a comparatively quiet period, that he had been too busy living to pen his habitual journal entries. In spite of his appalling daily circumstances, his new sense of purpose and direction derived from having to share such living conditions in proximity with other like-minded people.

Figures in a Tent and Winter Woolies are painted in sepia wash on top of pen and ink drawings. These were the only art materials that Vaughan could carry in his knap sack. Having no space to spread out and no table on which to work, he made do with a bottle of ink and a pen. He would prop himself up against his knapsack and work by candlelight.

There are various depictions of Vaughan’s life under canvas. In these the forms are described tonally and in terms of subtle chiaroscuro effects, conveying qualities of the candlelight that illuminated the tent. In each of the studies of the recruits living in tents, a gentle sense of eroticism underpins the scenes. The men, living without personal space or privacy, exist in a physically cramped space, while carrying out everyday tasks half-naked in the presence of their comrades. They strip off their clothes, reach into their underwear and pull on their trousers without embarrassment, while Vaughan is keen to record all these activities. 

Like the other official war artists, Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore, with their bombed-out streets and underground shelters, Vaughan produced both socially relevant and artistically important wartime images. His visual records and documentation of the Non-Combatant Corps’ living and working conditions are significant examples of World War II art.