Keith Vaughan 1912-1977

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.

Private Collection, UK

Vaughan visited Derbyshire as a soldier in 1942. This drawing was part of Vaughan’ s first one man exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in 1944.

Landscape with Sheep and Shepherd is typical of Vaughan’ s Neo-Romantic work of the 1940s. We are immediately reminded of Samuel Palmer’ s monochromatic sepia drawings of pastoral night scenes with shepherds tending their flocks. Both the subject and execution here consciously evoke those visionary prototypes. Vaughan, however, replaces the evocation of nocturnal tranquillity with something perhaps more unsettling, reflecting the wartime atmosphere of the time. Working on the land he was severely limited in terms of the materials he had at his disposal, and yet he produced dozens of pictures full of symbolic meaning and atmospheric tension. The year he painted Landscape with Sheep and Shepherd he wrote in a catalogue note for his first one man show:

An artist who finds himself in the position of an ordinary soldier in the army can 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 new army haversack was the largest drawing book it would accommodate and an unbreakable bottle of black ink. I now spent my off-dutyhours 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. By 1942 I had done all I wanted of this. To accommodate my slightly increased ambitions, I added to my materials one or two more bottles of ink, two pots of gouache and a few crayons. With these I hoped to be able to recover something of the solidity and depth of oil, while satisfying the requirements of intermittent work and total concealment of the results. At first I tried making brief notes as the subjects occurred to me with the intention, later on, of working them out. But this I found simply tapped the current of one’ s energy without leading anywhere, and the accumulation of notes quickly outgrew the possibility of ever utilising them. So I seized on one or two out of the stream, and these I tried to carry as near completion as I could with the medium and the facilities I had to work with.

(Keith Vaughan, catalogue note for Keith Vaughan: Gouaches and Drawings , Alex Reid and Lefevre Gallery, London,1944)

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.

Private Collection, UK

Philip Vann and Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan (Farnham: Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2012), p. 87, illustrated p. 88.

Olympia, London, 2002, # 248

Keith Vaughan was only twenty when he set up a darkroom in his family home to develop his own photographs. His subject would remain, principally, the male figure. The darkroom doubled as a studio where he could photograph models, but he also took many reels on Pagham beach, in Sussex, against a backdrop of shingle, tangled nets and the weathered hulls of boats. ₁ In these the figures are often silhouetted, their torsos braced, stretched or turning; at other times they are loose-limbed, sunbathing or playful. Vaughan acknowledged that these forms provided source material for his paintings without needing to consult them. The imagery, once rooted in his subconscious, ‘just emerged when called’. ₂

These photographs were both coded and covert, in that for many years they were little known. For Vaughan, photography granted a freedom he lacked in everyday life – justifying and legitimising a studied observation of the male figure. The resulting compositions draw their strength from a knowledge of how light could enhance the structure of the figure. When Vaughan developed the ideas as drawings, he abstracted and simplified, while retaining the sharply defined musculature, leanness and angularity of the originals. One example, a pencil Study of Two Figures (1948), bought by Peter Pears, was later used as a cover for Vaughan’s Journals. ₃

Comparing this drawing and Landscape with Nude Bathers (1948), it is easy to see that they originate from similar source material. The drawing shows two nude figures with a tree, one half-turned, the other facing forward. Neither figure is complete, suggesting a cropped or closely focused photograph. In the painting, the basic composition is identical – two figures and a tree – yet the right-hand figure is slightly distanced and thus shown more completely. Intriguingly, for a ‘nude’, it is also, quite visibly, clothed. Useful comparison perhaps ends there. The drawing, almost exactly half the size of the painting, is executed with a bounding, energetic line and dense hatching specific to its medium.

Through colour, and through a volumetric, almost sculptural approach, Landscape with Nude Bathers takes the subject in a different direction. It is clear, from a statement written contemporaneously, that the relationship of figure to landscape preoccupied Vaughan:

The articulation of the arm-joint in the shoulder is the articulation of the branch in the tree-trunk, and the folds of the shirt round the arm pit are the folds of the bark around the tree joint. Hands are like leaves. The taut, tight curve of the spine is only warmed and more human than the curve of the tree trunk. Each part of the one is interchangeable with the other, yet the harmony is achieved without losing a shred of separate identities, the one a human being, the other a tree in the garden. ₄

This description relates pertinently to Landscape with Nude Bathers, pointing attention to the green of the left-hand figure’s spine which echoes the tree trunk. Hands may not be leaves, yet they grasp the tree’s limbs. Each figure interacts closely with the tree, the right-hand figure’s legs pressed so closely against the trunk as to join it. The conjunction was noted by John Berger in 1951, when he wrote of Vaughan, ‘the vulnerability of his figures (their nakedness is like trees stripped of their bark) is poetically compelling’. ₅

The palette of Landscape with Nude Bathers painting unites its figures with the landscape, in a soft green, blue, and ochre totality, as colour migrates from flesh to water to bark. Although the effect is quiet, a charged atmosphere pervades the scene. The tree provides a cruciform structure, offset by a blue-grey reverberation suggesting cloud, hill or headland. Reinforcing this is a vector from left to right, in the downward stroke of the branch and the imagined gaze from figure to figure, which pinions and exhilarates the landscape. Only the clothed figure’s gaze is overt, returning us to the beach at Pagham, and what might be witnessed – and recalled – through the lens of the camera.

₁ Philip Wright, ‘Keith Vaughan: the Pagham photographs’, in Keith Vaughan: On Pagham Beach, Photographs and Collages from the 1930s (London: Austin / Desmond Fine Art, 2017), p. 8.
₂ Vaughan, quoted in ‘John Ball in Conversation with Nicholas Goodison’, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings (London: Osborne Samuel, 2007), p. 12.
₃ Keith Vaughan, Journals 1939–1977, ed. Alan Ross (London: John Murray, 1989).
₄ Keith Vaughan, ‘Statement’ (c. 1948), in Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work (London: Constable & Co., 1990), p. 143.
₅ John Berger, New Statesman (10 November 1951), quoted in Philip Vann and Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan (Farnham: Lund Humphries, in association with Osborne Samuel, 2012), p. 88.

Private Collection, UK

R.L. Banks
George Milman
Robert Wraight
Sir Richard Attenborough
Private collection, UK

THESEUS AND THE MINOTAURE (INTERIOR AT MINOS or THESEUS), 1950, (P247)
Geffrye Museum, London, ‘Keith Vaughan: Images of Man’ catalogue, illustrated p. 29
Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946 -77, Sansom & Co Bristol, 2012, no. AH99

Lefevre Gallery, London. ‘Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Gouaches’, 1950 (titled Theseus)
Hatton Gallery, University of Durham, Newcastle, ‘Keith Vaughan: Retrospective’, 1965 (no. 7; title Theseus1950)
Whitechapel Gallery, London ‘Keith Vaughan: Retrospective’, 1962 (no. 122; title Theseus 1951; ill. in catalogue pl.xxiii)
Tate Britain, London. On three year loan from 2010-13

In an attempt to encourage British painters to produce large-scale works for the Festival of Britain, the Arts Council offered them free materials and enormous canvases. The idea was to promote ambitious, heroic painting after the wartime period of shortages and rationing. Vaughan submitted Theseus and the Minotaure , the largest picture he ever painted, aside from his publically commissioned murals. He described the painting in the following terms: 

The first thing to say about the painting was that it was wrongly titled owing to my lack of classicalscholarship. I was under the impression that Minos was an island instead of the name of the king. Thepainting should be called ‘ Theseus’ or ‘ Theseus and the Minotaure’ . It was suggested by André Gide’ s novelThésée in which the minotaure is depicted not as the horned monster of classical anthropology but as a misunderstood youth who spends his time in the labyrinth eating pomegranates and picking petals off flowers.

(Keith Vaughan, letter, quoted in Hepworth, Keith Vaughan the Mature Oils , Sansom & Co., 2012)

The Classical Myth:

In the Homeric myth, King Minos was the powerful ruler of ancient Crete. To sanction his authority and confirm his legitimacy to rule he prayed to Poseidon to send him a sign. This came in the form of a white bull rising from the waves. Minos did not sacrifice it to Poseidon, as instructed, but substituted another and kept the prized animal. As punishment Poseidon cursed him by having his wife Queen Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. She became pregnant and gave birth to a halfman, half-bull creature – the Minotaur. Minos ordered his architect Daedalus to construct a series of labyrinthine corridors beneath his palace at Knossos in which to imprison the monster.

Minos went on to defeat the Athenians after a drawn-out military dispute. As tribute King Aegeus was forced, every nine years, to deliver up seven young men and seven young women to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. On the third occasion his son Theseus volunteered as one of the victims, undertaking to slay the Minotaur. When he arrived in Crete he met Ariadne, daughter of Minos and they fell in love. She gave him a ball of twine to unravel as he set off into the labyrinth. After a fearsome battle Theseus slayed the Minotaur and, aided by the twine, was able to navigate his way back to Ariadne. They escaped Crete together, sailing to the island of Naxos where Theseus later abandoned her.

André Gide’ s Narrative:

While preparing Theseus and the Minotaure Vaughan turned to French literature for inspiration rather than illustrate the much-visited ancient legend. André Gide, one of his favourite writers, published his final novel Thésée in 1946, having worked on it for over two decades. Vaughan read this reimagined version in French and based his painting on Gide’ s post-Freudian interpretation.

For him the Minotaur represented a fatal, self-absorbing beauty whose destructive allure was completely irresistible. He transposed the Minotaur, usually conceived as violent and murderous, to symbolise the principle of self-destruction – the monster within us all. Theseus has to engage in a battle with himself, therefore, before escaping the labyrinth. His conflict is not so much with the Minotaur, but a struggle for his soul against his inner self-monster and the forces of luxurious indulgence. The labyrinth, in Gide’ s conception, is an internal prison of one’ s own devising, the walls and corridors of which are buried deep within the self. These are filled with such pungent narcotics, one never feels the urge to escape.

Vaughan’ s Interpretation:

Two years after the publication of Thésée Vaughan visited Paris and had a brief affair with a young man called Karlo. His journal states that on his return Vaughan felt trapped inside his own internal labyrinth, caught between self-indulgence and futile attempts to work:

August 14, 1948:

Treasure the memory of Karlo – his debonair grace – his laughter, his frank lust, his beauty, his fantasticsordid, tiny room in the roof – stairs – naked lamps – labyrinth of corridors – pitch black – holding hishand like Ariadne stumbling after Theseus. Very much a slave now to vice, to sexual lusts, increasing complication of solitary gratification. Paralysis of will, imagination, action. Sit for hours in my studioblocked by noise of traffic, crescendo, decrescendo – like soft repeating whip lashes over my raw brain.

Hands bleed from clawing the smooth hard surface for a hold. I become aware of this growing sense of doom which has been going on for a year or more. Almost as though I were under the sentence of death.

Theseus:

Theseus appears in the heart of the labyrinth, having negotiated its passageways. He is emerging into a light-filled room silhouetted against the blackness of the doorway. He stands, head bowed and arms open, as though offering himself as a sacrificial victim. At first his pose and attitude might seem puzzlingly submissive, since his traditional motive for having arrived here is to slay the Minotaur. But in Gide’ s conception he is also here to slay the self-monster. Vaughan describes him in a grey-buff colour, slightly darker than the other figures, reminding us of Gide’ s words: 

‘The colour of truth is grey.’ He is psychologically removed from the other two figures and mentally prepares himself for his ordeal.

Ariadne:

Ariadne, emotionally detached from both Thesues and the Minotaur, does not turn towards her lover as he arrives. She stares abstractedly at something undisclosed outside the realm of the painting. This might be explained in the following way. In both the classical myth and in Gide’ s interpretation Ariadne should be in the palace of Minos, awaiting Theseus. Vaughan employs continuous narrative and expects the viewer to accept that he is simultaneously representing her and the others within the same physical space. This was a common pictorial convention of the Quattrocento narrative painters that Vaughan so admired. She is naked, vulnerable and crosslegged. Her self-embracing pose, twitching toes and neurotic stare communicate her anxiety. Perhaps she has prescience, in the manner of the Virgin Mary in Renaissance paintings, of her forthcoming sadness – of how she will be abandoned by Theseus. Alternatively, Vaughan’ s journal entry of 1948 implies that he understood Ariadne to have followed Theseus through the labyrinth and, given his uncertain grasp of the original myth, has included her in the scene.

The Minotaur:

The Minotaur of antiquity is traditionally depicted in Western art as a fearsome, tormented beast, half-man and half bull, complete with horns, hair and hooves. His rapacious, blood-thirsty nature made him one of the most formidable creatures of Greek mythology. In Vaughan’ s characterization he represents the allure of physical beauty and pleasure, in accordance with Gide’ s narrative. His narcissistic, open pose displays his athletic proportions and genitalia and reveals a character used to languorous, pleasure-seeking pursuits. He yawns and stretches, invincible and irresistible in his all-consuming world of hedonism. Lying on the floor before him is a pomegranate, a lemon and discarded petals torn from flowers in his indolent ennui . The figure is based on Vaughan’ s Reclining Nude , 1950, painted around this time. Even the lemon is retained in the composition.

Vaughan made a series of pencil studies to work out the figural arrangements and treatment of the complex space. The bed on which the Minotaur reclines, for example, is viewed from several anglessimultaneously in accordance with Cubist principles. Furthermore, the consistent tilting and flattening of form creates a stage-like setting, intentionally theatrical and stylized. The artificiality of this pictorial space has to support both the presence of Ariadne in the palace, and the presence of Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Similarly Vaughan’ s palette is un-naturalistically muted with only a few accents of colour provided by the blue sheet and the discarded fruits on the floor. The dark, claustrophobic atmosphere creates a sense of foreboding and assists in emphasizing the pale fleshy tones of the figures. A naturalistic treatment could not have been further from Vaughan’ s intention:

September, 1963:

All art is artifact, artificial, unreal. A parody of reality. Reality is simply the fleeting pain or joy that is inside you, which vanishes as soon as you try to refine it in shape or word. That is why all talk of realism in art is nonsense. Reality may be implied, intended, hinted at, even glimpsed, but never revealed or stated.

Vaughan admired Gide as both a writer and a man. He identified with him as a creative spirit and shared with him similar philosophical attitudes as well as sexual tastes. There is a passage that seems prophetic when we apply it to Vaughan:

I face death alone willingly. I’ ve tasted the best of life. It is pleasing to me to think that after I am gone, thanks

to me, mankind will be happier, better and freer. For the benefit of future man, I created my work. I lived.

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 measurment 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)

Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow
Redfern Gallery, London
Private Collection, London

Vaughan must have produced hundreds of these compact and densely worked little landscapes over the course of his career. Never without his sketchbook or notepad, he would make drawings and visual notes whenever he went walking or would pull over by the side of the road and draw in his car. It was a way of recording or, to be more precise, paraphrasing what he saw.

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. If there is water too, then it is almost perfect – I don’ t mean that it should be empty. 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. It may take anything from three days or three months to make this contact.

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. I do not like views or mountains but I like the sea only when looking landward – in one such landscape there would be enough material for a lifetime. There would be no need to change because the landscape is changing each hour of the day & week of the year. The longer one watches, the more one sees.

(Keith Vaughan, unpublished and undated studio notes, c. 1950)

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

Royal West of England Academy, 1958
Laurence Ogilvie Esq, purchased from above
Private Collection, UK

Massey & Hepworth, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, p.110, cat no. AH274

Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, Spring Exhibition, 1958, cat.no. 104
Bath Festival Exhibition, Loan Exhibition of Paintings from Private Collections, June, 1963, cat. no.33
Bristol City Art Gallery, 1987-1990

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.

Redfern Gallery Ltd., London, 30th March 1983

The human figure, in an assortment of settings and situations, was always the most fertile starting point for Vaughan. He placed the highest emotional investment in the male nude and explored its potential for picture making at every opportunity. He painted dozens of images of bathers in oil and gouache and made countless drawings of them in sketchbooks. His interest in the subject began as early as 1933. It was that year he discovered the bathing ponds at Highgate and soon became a regular visitor. He made visual records with his Leica camera of the young men in the clothes-free sunbathing area. A few years later he began spending his summer weekends with friends on Pagham beach where they wasted away sun-drenched days ‘ playing at pagans’ on the hot shingle. The photographs he took informed many of his later paintings of bathers and assemblies of figures.

The bather theme legitimised his use of the male nude at a time when virtually no other British painter was exploring it. Bathers obsessed Vaughan. He painted compositions consisting of single bathers, groups of bathers, bathers drying themselves, bathers on beaches, by rivers and ponds, in woodlands and wetlands, sunbathers and bathers with fishermen in secluded coves.

Vaughan was able to invest these paintings with a surprising emotional range. This largely monochromatic and somewhat melancholic version, for example, is not what one would expect of a subject usually associated with relaxation, leisure and a warm, summer climate. There is a distinct tension between the two long-limbed figures who don’ t relate to one another either through glance or gesture. One is preoccupied in towelling himself while the other seems to stride away. Furthermore, the title informs us, though it is difficult to glean this from the imagery, that they are beside a cliff – not an ideal place to sunbathe. 

The anatomy of the bathers is described in energetically serrated, inky lines while the landscape is rendered with opaque passages of gouache. Nevertheless Vaughan amalgamates figure and setting into a satisfying unity.

Private Collection, UK

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.

Private collection, UK

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Prof. John Ball bequeath to the Hargreaves and Ball Trust
Private Collection

Philip Vann & Gerald Hastings. Keith Vaughan , Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, London, 2012, (illus. pl.180, p.171 as Ait-Rassam).

Vaughan had always been interested in the theme of assembling groups of figures and was particularly struck by the exotic crowds he discovered gathering outside the mosques at Taroudannt and at religious meetings he witnessed in Ait-Kassam. Cinnamon-tinted figures emerge from the similarly coloured setting. Rich purples are played off against blue forms and white figures. The thread-like licks of white pigment trailing across the composition feature in several of the Moroccan gouaches.

From the mid 1960s onwards, Vaughan was steering his course midway between figuration and abstraction. In an interview he gave the year he painted this gouache, he described his approach in the following terms:

I am steering closer towards the point of total non-figuration, moving towards a sort of musical interpretation – an abstracted interpretation…like a musician, the subject matter becomes less and less important as the painting takes shape…The subject-matter is simply what gets one going and where you kick off from.

Alan Ross (Owner and editor of London Magazine 1961-2001)

Olympia, London, 2002 (386)
Osborne Samuel Gallery, London, 2007, (p.70 no.49)

North African Scene is one of Vaughan’ s working drawings and was most probably made in situ since the use of pastel and pencil is so freshly worked. The crenellated skyline in the middle distance is repeated at the right, in the foreground. This visual rhyme links the rooftop formations with the row of heads of the figures and helps explain the reoccurring, block-like motifs we find in many of his major paintings of the 1960s (see Group of Figures , 1964, Musicians at Marrakesh , 1966 and Crowd Assembling I & II , 1968). The arrows, at the upper centre, notate and emphasize this idea and probably function as aides memoires for future reference.

Unable to travel with brushes and oil paints, Vaughan formed the habit of taking small notebooks, pencils and pastels with him on holiday. His drawings, source photographs and journal notations were used to remind him of the colours and atmospheres of the places he visited and assisted him in working out compositions in his studio back in London.

The reddish, mud-coloured buildings and the white and blue djellabas, depicted in pastel, correspond to Vaughan’ s journal descriptions. It is a highly worked image and a good deal of vigourous rubbing and scraping has taken place. Several different pastels have been overlaid and blended to achieve a distinctly tactile quality. The interpenetration of the forms is simultaneously conceived in both abstract and figurative terms as Vaughan amalgamates individual figures. This formal integration became a hallmark of much of his work of the mid-1960s and here expresses the bustle and jostle of the Moroccan scene.

Prof. John Ball
Dr Julian Lax
Nicolas and Frances McDowall

Labels on frame verso inscribed: “Bought by J.N. Ball from Keith Vaughan, January 1967, at his studio at 9, Belsize Park, Hampstead, London, NW3. My first purchase directly from Keith Vaughan.”

Night Bathers is one of Vaughan’ s most haunting and perplexing gouaches. The predominantly

dark, monochromatic nature of the woodland setting evokes a distinctly enigmatic mood, which

echoes his former Neo-Romantic style. The silvery light on the two figures amplifies the mysterious

atmosphere implying that they are illuminated by moonlight. The dominating foreground figure,

passive and pensive, is viewed in profile while his more active companion occupies the middle

distance. We detect a quality of anxious tension and wonder why are they bathing by night and why

they are physically apart from one another?

Perhaps the puzzling imagery in Night Bathers may be explained by the disintegration of Vaughan’ s

relationship with his partner Ramsay who had recently moved to their Harrow Hill cottage in

Essex. Vaughan visited him most weekends, inviting Patrick Procktor, David Hockney, Keith Milow

and various other friends to join them. Mario Dubsky, one of Vaughan’ s students, remembered

how they would all go bathing at night in the swimming pond at the end of the garden and this

gouache may recall one of those occasions.

On the reverse of the frame are various exhibition labels. One of them informs us that this painting

once belonged to John Ball and Gordon Hargreaves, Vaughan’ s close friends and keen collectors.

It reads:

Bought by J. N. Ball from Keith Vaughan, January 1967, at his studio at 9, Belsize Park, Hampstead,

London, NW3. My first purchase directly from Keith Vaughan.

Purchased in 1990 from Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd, London

Vaughan was stationed at Codford in Wiltshire in the summer of 1942, near Ashton Gifford House, where Greenways Preparatory School had been evacuated from Bognor Regis. His company was given the task of clearing the grounds, which were entirely surrounded by a tall, imposing wall. The romantic, overgrown setting inspired several paintings over the course of the next few years (see The Working Party , 1942, Tree Felling at Ashton Gifford, 1942-43 and The Garden at Ashton Gifford,1944). During his few leisure hours, Vaughan worked on his wartime drawings and gouaches in the mess room or in his barracks, while his compatriots played darts or listened to the radio. Hehad no studio to work in and was forced to reduce his materials to a bare minimum. Nevertheless he produced some extremely memorable wartime images.

The work on the land not only offered the soldiers worthwhile community service but also provided much needed fuel for the army in the form of wood. It was exhausting employment since dozens of trees had to be felled and cut into regulation-sized logs with only handsaws. While No. 9 Company spent the hot summer months sweating at their labours, Vaughan took the opportunity, during his breaks, to work on his drawings, usually in pen and ink that he carried with him in his regulation knapsack. He filled several sketchbooks with rapidly executed figure studies and related material, finding considerable aesthetic qualities in his surroundings, enough to write about 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.

(Keith Vaughan, letter to Norman Towne, October 12, 1942).

Half a dozen or so soldiers can be seen in the undergrowth, separated from one another by both the interlacing roots and branches as well as their individual psychological dispositions. One of the reasons there were so many versions of The Wall at Ashton Gifford is because Vaughan was planning a composition, unrealised alas, in which the felled trees were to be paralleled with the fallen soldiers of the war. It ought to be remembered that his younger brother Dick had recently been shot down and killed over France.

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

Redfern Gallery / Jan-Feb 1986, British Prints:The Post-War Years 1945-1960, with essay by Gordon Samuel,Cat No 110 in b/w

Redfern Gallery, 1949, Les Peintres-Graveurs Exposition du 1 Decembre au 31 Decembre 1949: English Lithographs & Monotypes in colour with a foreward by Philip James. Cat No. 206 catalogued as ‘Landscape’

Vaughan made eight lithographs; almost all are signed but none are numbered, and the editions are unknown. Added to this, there is no evidence as to who the printers were.

During the immediate post-war years, printmaking facilities in London and the UK in general did not exist in the way we know today. Paris led the way for fine art printing from the late 19 th century and printers like Atelier Mourlot began as commercial workshops printing labels and posters in the mid-19 th century.

During the latter half of the 1940s London did not as yet enjoy the traditional expertise of the Paris ateliers. Excellent printers did exist in Britain but mainly as technicians in the printmaking departments of the art schools. Two such men were the Devenish brothers, George and Ernest. George was drafted into the Royal College of Art printmaking department by Edwin La Dell, who became Head of Department in 1948. Emest was the ‘master printer’ at the Central School.

In the post war years colour lithography began to emerge again. Millers Press in Lewes was begun by Frances Byng Stamper and her artist sister Caroline Lucas. In 1948 the Millers Press and Rex Nan Kivell’ s Redfern Gallery began a joint venture called The Society of London Painter Printers modelled along the late 19 th century Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers whose members worked in all forms of creative forward-thinking original printmaking. In Lewes they only had a proofing press, so the printing was outsourced to various printers. Documentary evidence shows that a large amount of work was commissioned by Millers but unfortunately, no mention is made of printers apart from Ravel in Paris and the Chiswick Press. Keith Vaughan for example, was commissioned by Millers to make Figure with Boat. During the late 1940s Vaughan was teaching at the Central School. It is possible that Winter Landscape lithograph was printed for Vaughan by Emest Devenish at the Central, although there is no documentary evidence to support this.