Vaughan was interested in how the heavy frosts and deep snows of winterhad the capacity to transform the familiar. During his years at Harrow Hill Cottage in Essex, he produced no fewer than eleven oil paintings depicting snowscapes. This large-scale example is characteristic of his later, simplified style. It is based on one of a series of Kodachrome transparencies hetook over the winter of 1971-72, which recalled the effects of sustained snowfall. They gave rise to several other winter landscapes, including Snow Drift at Harrow Hill, 1970/72; Landscape under Snow I and II, 1971; Small Winter Landscape I and II, 1972 and, three years later, Winter Landscape of 1975.
The prevailing whiteness of Winter Landscape is achieved through exposing the primed surface. Colour is sparingly deployed: dark areas of burnt umber describe trees and undergrowth, while occasional blue passages in the upper areas denotethe sky without recourse to a horizon line. Diluted pigment is brushed onto the surface in a series of slanting gestures, evoking bare winter foliage, twigs, boughs and branches emerging through a heavy quilting of snow. Vaughan, who was right-handed, habitually worked with diagonal brush marks that incline to the right. Many of his compositions tilt and bend in this manner. Here, this directional bias lends the surface a quiet, but persistent, sense of movement. The painting’s visual sparsity and economy of means mirror the austerity of winter itself, while chromatic restraint echoes the season’s bareness and arrested growth.

The Artist’s Estate
Agnew’s Gallery, London
Private collection, U.K. (since 1990)

A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sanson & Co., Bristol, 2012, p. 191, no. AH592 (ill.)
Agnew’s, exhibition catalogue, 1990, p. 41 (ill.)

London, Agnew’s, 1990, no. 41
London, Agnew’s, Keith Vaughan, 2012, no. 32