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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Private Collection, UK

Manchester, Tib Lane Gallery, December 1968