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

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

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

Mr and Mrs J. Wiltshire

Private collection, Belgium

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

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

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

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

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

London, Agnew’s, 1990, no. 26