British Art Fair: Saatchi Gallery

The winged figure, often presented as a pair, threads through Chadwick’s sculpture from the mid-1950s onwards. Early examples often danced in duet, their wings splayed in courtship ritual. In 1962 Chadwick transformed the idea completely, starkly abstracting its form to resemble aeroplane wings: Two Winged Figures, constructed from plate steel at an industrial works in Italy, and painted bright yellow and black, towered above the viewer.

If there was always a dialogue between the human and the machine, by the early 1970s Chadwick’s imagery had settled in favour of the former. Maquette VI Two Winged Figures (1973) is, on balance, more human than otherwise. The wings, folded downwards, resemble robes. The female figure is clearly identifiable as such, broad-hipped and round-breasted, while the square shoulders of the male figure determine the geometric fall of his tunic and wings. But the head? So often in Chadwick’s sculpture this is where ambiguity concentrates. Heads resemble beaks, science-fiction jaws, insectoid mandibles, square television monitors. Sometimes they are reduced almost to invisibility, seeding doubt as to their sentience. In Maquette VI Two Winged Figures, Chadwick characteristically uses a cube and pyramid to denote difference. Borne erect, and rendered proportionally in relation to each figure’s torso, these heads give cause for reassurance – yet the frisson of alterity persists.

Basil Trakman, South Africa
Riva Cohen, Atlantic Art Gallery, South Africa (purchased from the above 1987), thence by descent
Private Collection, USA

D. Farr and E. Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick Sculptor: With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Farnham, 2014, p. 297, no. 673s (another cast ill.)

London, Marlborough Fine Art, January – February 1974, and tour

Waddington and Shiell Galleries Ltd., Toronto, Ontario
Private Collection, Toronto, Ontario (acquired from the above in November 1985)
Osborne Samuel, London

D. Farr and E. Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2014, p. 359, cat. no. C25 (another cast ill. b&w)

Bath, Beaux Arts, September – October 1986 (another cast)

The work is composed of three separate elements: the two figures and the base.

Osborne Samuel, London

D. Farr
and E. Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated
Catalogue 1947-2003, Farnham, 2014, p. 341, no. 787S (another cast ill.)

Belgium, Fondation Veranneman, Kruishoutem, October-December 1980 (another cast)

From May 1946, when John Craxton first moved to Greece, through to 1967, much of his work drew on its people, nature and landscapes for inspiration. He depicted sailors, fishermen and shepherds, along with taverna life, coastal scenes, local animals (particularly goats) and the bountiful sealife. But a coup in April 1967 resulted in a military junta ruling Greece, after which a fractious and suspicious relationship developed between Craxton and the new regime, with accusations of espionage. The situation did not improve and eventually the artist decided to leave his beloved Greece. Travelling was on the agenda once again, with an absence from Greece for much of the 1970s. 

‘In 1970 he accompanied Michael and Judy Astor on their Kenyan honeymoon, sketching and painting monkeys, wildebeest and lions while on safari. Peter Pears bought a picture of a majestic old lion at a watering hole. It went to Aldeburgh when Benjamin Britten was starting work on the opera Death in Venice, adapting the Thomas Mann novella about an aged and blocked writer tormented by a vision of boyish beauty. The lion became a visual metaphor for the dying composer. It hung in the ground-floor study that Ben used when he could no longer climb the stairs to his former workroom until his death in 1976.’ 1

This charcoal drawing, which is twice as large as the Britten Pears Arts’ painting, depicts the same subject but incorporates the whole creature. The work has never previously been offered for sale.

1. Ian Collins, John Craxton, A Life of Gifts, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2021, pp. 303-304

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

London, Osborne Samuel, Craxton’s Cats, 19th September – 4th October 2024

Though born in England, John Craxton always felt most
himself in the sun-soaked islands of the Aegean Sea. After his first visit to
Greece in 1946, he would rarely return to his homeland, hopping from island to
island with other wayfaring friends. However, in 1967, he was exiled under
suspicion of looting and espionage. After an excruciatingly long absence, the
artist would make his return a decade later. Man Drinking Ouzo (early 1980s)
is Craxton picking up right where he left off. The artist’s hand, practised in depicting
the familiar characters of Greek tavernas, here traces the silhouette of a man
drinking ouzo, a Greek anise aperitif.

Unlike his more spontaneous drawings, this composition
seems to be a more meditated preparatory work for Still Life with Three
Sailors (1982-1987). With the pose already determined, the artist’s usually
bold and confident lines are slightly feathered in the details, carving a path
through the creases of the man’s sleeves. In the final painting, the figures
wear sailors’ uniforms, perhaps explaining the uncertain rendering of the
figure’s shirt collar.

Though Still Life with Three Sailors would adopt a
less naturalistic use of colour, Man Drinking Ouzo already features
Craxton’s prismatic palette. On a trip to Istanbul in 1985, Craxton filled his
pockets with various new paints and pigments, one being a striking verdigris
that would become a frequent feature of his works in the following years. The
cloud of jade green in Man Drinking Ouzo certainly indicates the
beginning of this trend, engulfing the drawing’s subject. The use of lines as
light (a Craxton signature) helps to break through the mass of blue and green,
bringing both structure and atmosphere. While deep pinks delineate shadows, highlights
of bright yellow run from the bottom of the elbow to the bridge of the nose, recalling
the warm sunshine of the picture’s Grecian setting.

Man Drinking Ouzo stands as both a study and an
independent work, displaying Craxton’s sustained engagement with the visual
atmosphere of Greece and indicating the stylistic direction of later work.

John Craxton Estate

I. Collins, John Craxton, Drawn to Light, Mesher, Istanbul, 2023, p. 233 (ill. col.)

Istanbul, Mesher, John Craxton, Drawn to Light, 5 April 2023 – 23 July 2023

Trinity House, London
Osborne Samuel, London
Private Collection, UK

Heath conjures an abstract composition dominated by an internal splintered oval – the classic format of the society portrait head – and an earthy, warm brown and ochre colour scheme. Heath’s origins as a landscape painter versed in a Slade ethos, in which analytic and even constructional drawing ruled, developed during his subsequent teaching career to a point where he adopted the motif of the life-room reclining or moving figure. The figure was, however, less naturalistic than a mere cipher for an independent and plastic structural vision.

Heath’s membership of the Fitzroy Street Constructionist group was pivotal and, where the Nine Abstract Artists group was concerned, he acted as a moderating link between the purist or concretist wing and the St. Ives-associated artists who, as Alloway remarked, employed “irrational expression by malerisch means”. The well-informed Heath was a sophisticated artist who, in his book ‘Abstract Painting: Its Origin and Meaning’, divided modern painting into the branches of formal and geometric (cubism) on the one hand and expressively romantic or subjective on the other.

Heath appears to have taken an ambivalent line within this dichotomy for, though his sensual surfaces are painterly and textured there is always a sense the fractured asymmetry of his forms are the logical outcome of implicit divisional order and planned planar cadence. A man of largely independent means, Heath conducted his art career with a gentile grace, relatively carefree that the full depth and subtlety of his painting would only come to full light through the long-term perspective of historical hindsight and reassessment.

The Artist

The Estate of the Artist

Osborne Samuel, London

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above 2012)

At the same time that Ben Nicholson was producing some of his most acclaimed and recognisable paintings in 1937, such as 1937 (painting) (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh) and 1937, June (painting) (Tate Gallery, London) he embarked on a deeply personal project inspired by the love for his three children with fellow artist, Winifred Nicholson. A series of paintings were produced which were intended to illustrate a children’s book, hence their childlike innocence and playfulness. Sadly, the scheme was never realised as the publishers Routledge pulled out.

‘It was not only the childlike vision that inclined Nicholson towards the consciously naive (a stylistic trait that recurs throughout his work, right up to his latest drawings). There was, outside himself, a historical influence too – the subjective revolution in art which, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, had increasingly forced every serious artist to question first principles, to become a child, a primitive, and slowly create his own language. This in turn was part of a larger reaction against the weight of tradition and the complexities of European civilisation in favour of an invigorating mixture of the primitive, the exotic and the childlike’. (P. Khoroche, Ben Nicholson, Drawings and Painted Reliefs, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2002, pp. 21-22)

This unique group of works by Ben Nicholson were often acquired by those very close to him. Cyril S. Reddihough for instance, one of Ben Nicholson’s earliest and most significant patrons, acquired the delightful George and Rufus, oil on board. Alastair Morton, the artist’s Scottish friend in Cumberland acquired another. The George and Rufus which Osborne Samuel is presenting is even more personal in nature, evidenced by the hand written inscription by the artist on the backboard, ‘for Kate with much love from Ben, Xmas 1937’. Kate was the second of three children Ben had with his first wife Winifred Nicholson. Born in 1929 she would have been eight years old upon receiving this dedicated festive gift, making it an exceptionally poignant painting which is appearing for sale for possibly its first ever time.

Ben Nicholson’s son, Jake, explains, ‘Dogs were called Booboo or Ponto, and horses seem to be George, or if they were roan coloured, Rufus, and they tended to be skittish. There was also a stag called Johnny and even a crocodile called Billy.’

The aforementioned Alastair Morton took the reigns of Edinburgh Weavers in 1931, having been founded by his family in 1928. A nursery fabric using several of Ben Nicholson’s illustrative paintings was finally realised by Edinburgh Weavers in 1978, an example of which is now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. The V&A fabric closely resembles Osborne Samuel’s George and Rufus. The landscape in the background of both seemingly depicting St Nicholas Chapel on ‘The Island’ in St Ives, Cornwall; not strictly an island but more a grassy peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow isthmus. The harbour walls of St Ives are positioned to its right.

The significance of this much loved series is that they reignited Ben Nicholson’s passion for landscape. After moving permanently to St Ives at the outbreak of war in 1939 with his second wife, Barbara Hepworth, Nicholson learnt one of his paintings back in London had sold for 42 guineas. The work in question was one from his George and Rufus series and inspired him to further explore his local landscape.

Kate Nicholson
Paul Vibert, thence by descent
Private Collection, UK

The Artist
The Artist’s Estate
Waddington Galleries, London
Acquired by the present owner from the above, November 1986

Exhibition catalogue, Waddington Galleries, Groups VI, London, 1983, no. 89, p. 45 (ill.)
P. Hamill, Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, New York, 1995, p. 141 (ill.)

London, The Tate Gallery, Ben Nicholson Drawings, November – December 1974, cat. no. 10
Zurich, Galerie Andre Emmerich, 1975
London, Waddington Galleries, Groups VI, February 2-26, 1983
Chicago, Illinois, Arts Club, Ben Nicholson, n.d.
Boston, Massachusetts, Thomas Segal Gallery, n.d.
Saint Louis, Missouri, City Museum (and elsewhere), Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, July 1, 2001-December 30, 2008

This intriguing work is Nicholson’s only portrait of his second wife Edie whom he married in October 1919. Signed and dated 1918, it must have been completed by the end of September that year when the painting was exhibited at the International Society under the mysterious title of Madame X as ‘Megan’ in ‘Tan-y-Bryn’. , No documentation has been found as to where, or when in 1918 the work was executed

.

With hindsight it has been noted that Nicholson chose to show in the same exhibition a portrait of his ‘former’ mistress Marie Laquelle, Le Bonnet tricolore (private collection), together with that of his future wife. (The two works were for sale.) The faces of both women are in shadow, avoiding the viewer’s gaze, but Edie is shown full face, recognizable by anyone who knew her, while her rosy cheeks and lips, against a pale skin and dark curly hair emphasise her youth – she was 28. However for the artist and his two sitters, like so many people, 1918 was a year of cataclysmic changes.  ,Two tragedies marked this nine month period – the news that Edie’s husband, Jack Stuart Wortley, was one of the thousands missing in action at Bullecourt, either killed on 21 March, or a prisoner, then on July 13 came the death of Nicholson’s wife Mabel in the influenza epidemic.

If the painting dates from before March 21 we are looking at a close friend of the Nicholson family, in particular of Mabel’s and of the artist’s son Ben, also a patron, for Edie had commissioned a portrait of her husband from Nicholson executed autumn 1915 (private collection), and the daughter of a patron since the couple had first met in 1912, the year Edie married Jack Stuart Wortley, when Nicholson was painting her mother, Lady Phillips (Johannesburg Art Gallery, on loan to Vergelegen Estate). In the early months of 1918 Nicholson is known to have painted a portrait of Edie’s brother, Capt. Francis Phillips (untraced: last recorded Central Mining and Investment Corporation, London) – a commission from Lady Phillips.

In the following months to the end of June Edie was still clinging to the hope that her husband was alive, though Nicholson and her family thought otherwise.  ,(His death was not confirmed until after the war had ended.) Nicholson wrote to Ben in America that Mabel was visiting Edie daily. In May Edie is believed to have stayed at Folly Farm, Berkshire where Nicholson was working the dining room murals for Mrs Merton, who was also a mutual friend. The portrait could date from that visit.

After Mabel’s unexpected death Edie joined Mrs Merton, Edwin Lutyens, and other friends of the artist to give him what support they could. In late August she arranged for Nicholson to paint a portrait of her father, Sir Lionel Phillips, but the project was abandoned the following month. (In 1924 two portraits were executed, the smaller version is in a private collection while the other was destroyed by enemy action in 1941.)

The artist and designer Edith ‘ED’ or ‘Edie’ Phillips (1890–1958) was the only daughter of the mining magnate Sir Lionel Phillips and his wife Florence. She exhibited with the Seven and Five Group under the pseudonym Elizabeth Drury, and, later, under her married name, Edith Nicholson. Having studied art in Germany from 1906 to 1907, and Paris in 1909, she enrolled at the Slade in 1911, at the same time as Ben Nicholson, although they did not meet until later. In October 1912 she married Jack Stuart Wortley (1880-1918). Edie became friendly with Mabel and the Nicholson family during this year. As soon as war broke out her husband volunteered and in the summer of 1916 Edie moved with her two young children to Maesyneuadd, a large manor house near Harlech in Wales where Mabel and the Nicholsons were already living. It was during the following eighteen months that she became friendly with Ben. They painted each other’s portraits, which were exhibited together at the National Portrait Society in February 1918, four months after Ben had gone to America: Portrait of E (Sheffield Art Gallery) and Portrait of a Gentleman (untraced) by Edith Stuart Wortley. Mabel also exhibited an untraced work, while Nicholson’s magisterial full-length portrait of Walter Greaves (Manchester City Art Gallery) received all the press attention. ,

What clues does the portrait provide? The most striking feature is the use of light and shade. A contemporary reviewer, Hugh Stokes, having noted the title of the work, described it as a theatrical scene, but the line of shade across the dress and broken light in the foreground right could be read as natural light falling through a partially open garden door. There are no other clues as to the setting. It is true that we are looking up at the figure as if she were on the stage, but this might be a device to make Edie appear taller, since she was in fact quite petite.

 , , , The pose is unusual with the right arm raised forming a diagonal with the elegantly extended left foot. (The light catches the shoe buckles – perhaps they are Georgian set with diamante.) Edie’s left hand is concealed in her pocket so we cannot see her wedding ring. In a way the pose recalls those of contemporary fashion mannequins, but also the tableau vivant that were so popular before the war. There was a ‘language’ to hand positions – the raised hand palm outwards conveying rejection or denial.

Her dress is a contemporary one, but are we looking at ‘Megan’ in costume or at Edie’s choice of dress? It is frustrating that the origin of the title under which the work was first exhibited has so far proved elusive. No published play or novel called Tan-y-Bryn has been found. This Welsh word meaning ‘hill of fire’ can be interpreted in various ways, including a hill lit by the rising or setting sun. A ballad or narrative poem in the great tradition of Welsh oral verse may be the source. Madame X recalls Sargent’s notorious painting, or perhaps it was all an attempt to confuse the viewer and conceal the sitter’s identity?

The work was probably purchased direct from the International Society by Mrs Gertrude Kinnell at the same time that she acquired Le Bonnet tricolore. She already owned Nicholson’s portrait of Max Beerbohm (National Portrait Gallery). The title was changed to Lady in Grey by the subsequent owner, the collector F. B. C.‘Bim’ Bravington who was a friend of Kit Nicholson, the artist’s youngest son. Grey rather than black was the colour worn by war widows which might suggest the work was painted after March 1918.

Concluding his review of the International Society exhibition Hugh Stokes declared he would like to dance to the music of Moussorgsky in front of the paintings of Mr McEvoy, Mr Nicholson and Mr Philpot. Referring with WN’s two portraits: ‘These are canvases in which the artist leaves nothing more to be said.’ This is true, although there are some things the viewer might like to know.

Mrs Gertrude Kinnell, probably purchased
from ISSPG in 1918
Acquired after her death by FBC Bravington
1967 with Marlborough Fine Art, No 17 as oil on canvas board
The Estate of the Late Michael Stratton
(acquired from the above)
Thence by descent

Lillian Browse William Nicholson, London, 1956 no. 278 entitled ‘Lady in Grey’ dated 1918 and no. 622 entitled ‘Madame X as ‘Megan’ in ‘Tan-y-Bryn’’ undated

Andrew Nicholson (ed.) William Nicholson , Painter, London, 1996 entitled ‘Lady in Grey’ illustrated in
colour p.178 

Patricia Reed William Nicholson: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, London, 2011 no. 387 entitled ‘Lady in Grey’

Hugh Stokes ‘The Autumn Exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers’ The Ladies’ Field, 19 October 1918, p180-1

5 October – November 1918 ‘25th Exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters, and Gravers’ no. 29 as ‘Madame X as ‘Megan’ in ‘Tany- Bryn’’

March 1967 ‘Sir William Nicholson’ Marlborough Fine Art Ltd, London, no. 17 as ‘Lady in Grey’ oil on canvas board

In 1943 Piper received a commission to document a slate quarry inside the mountain of Manod Mawr, north Wales, where the collections of the National Gallery were sent for safe storage during the war. While the interior proved too dark to draw, Piper took the opportunity to explore the region, using John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in North Wales (1898) as his guide.

Returning to Snowdonia in the summer of 1945, he discovered and rented ‘Pentre’, a cottage halfway down the Nant Ffrancon valley, through which a river runs, and to which, at the time, there was an unmade track barely passable in winter. Piper acquainted himself with the geology of the area by reading A.C. Ramsay’s The Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales (1860) and by drawing the mountains repeatedly, thereby beginning to notice how rocks near to hand often resembled the contours of those in the distance. Writing to Paul Nash in November 1945, he described a gale ‘which made the clouds whirl round the mountains in circles and lifted the water off the river in spray’, adding, ‘I hope you will see the place one day.’¹

It is likely that Rocky Sheepfold, which resembles Piper’s photographs of a drystone enclosure in the Nant Ffrancon valley, relates to the landscape near this cottage.² The painting balances topographical detail against broad washes of tone, evoking the mood of lithographs commissioned for the poetry volume English Scottish and Welsh Landscape (1944), described in a review as ‘sinister … livid and menacing’.³ To the perimeter of Rocky Sheepfold, scattered stones extrude from the grass, larger boulders shelter and form part of the enclosure. Elemental and windswept, it demonstrates an opportunistic intervention into the landscape.

¹ Frances Spalding, John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 267–8.

² John Piper, photographs of sheepfold in Nant Ffrancon, Caernarvonshire (c. 1930s–1980s), black and white negatives, Tate Archive TGA 8728/3/3/10–11.

³ English Scottish and Welsh Landscape 1700–c. 1860, verse chosen by John Betjeman and Geoffrey Taylor, with original lithographs by John Piper (London: Frederick Muller Ltd, 1944), The Studio (December 1944), p. 192.

Private Collection, U.S.A

A gift from the artist to Robert and Lillian Melville.
Thomas Agnew & Sons, London
Private Collection, UK (acquired from the above in July 1987)

Osborne Samuel, London

London, Thomas Agnew & Sons, Modern British Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings, Sculpture and Prints from 1800 to the Present Day, March – April 1986, no. 84, as ‘Group of Compositions’
Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard, Alan Reynolds, August – September 2003, no. 14, as ‘Group of Compositions’

Unseen in public for over sixty years, Cliffs at Dieppe, painted circa 1922, forms part of the artist’s final ‘Dieppe period’ of 1919-1922, which Dr Wendy Baron has described as ‘among the most productive of Sickert’s career’. (Dr W. Baron, Sickert: Paintings and Drawings, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2006, p. 109).

Several of the artist’s earliest paintings dating from circa 1885 show the Normandy port town, including The Harbour, Dieppe, now in Leeds City Art Gallery (Baron, cat. no. 29). The artist had married Ellen Cobden in 1885 and the newly married couple spent the summer in Dieppe where his parents and Whistler were among the house guests. Sickert then moved to Dieppe from London in the winter of 1898 and did not return until 1905. Finally, in 1919, he returned and settled at the village of Envermeu, outside the town, with his second wife Christine Angus.

Whilst many painters visited and worked in Dieppe, it was Sickert who immersed himself in documenting every aspect of the town in an obsessive manner, from its streets, churches, old houses and nightlife to the environs of the historic Le Pollet district, as depicted in this oil. The town was considered his second home after London, and between 1898-1905 was his primary residence.

Dr Wendy Baron has identified the location. The Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours chapel, built in 1876, can be seen on the eastern cliff top. This beautiful, stone chapel was erected in memory of sailors lost at sea. Beneath this is the harbour of Le Pollet, with the rigging of a boat appearing above the quayside.

We are grateful to Dr Wendy Baron for confirming the authenticity and location of this painting.

Mr Henry Jeremy Renton, by 1962, thence by descent
Private collection, U.K.

Whistler is credited with coining the term Nocturne to describe his moody twilight Thames views some 60 years before Trevelyan used the title for this night view, a radically different proposition, owing more perhaps to the expressionism of Van Gogh than Whistler’s restrained and understated nocturnal paintings.

Julian Trevelyan’s Nocturne, 1954 is a typically vivid and exuberant painting, capturing the essence of London at night, a kaleidoscope of colour and light and rhythmic movement. Then as now this familiar view at the Hyde Park Corner roundabout facing west to the grand gates to Hyde Park is a chaotic free for all with taxis, buses and cars all struggling to pass through one of London’s busiest intersections. Trevelyan’s interpretation is impressionistic, spontaneous and symbolises the joie de vivre that returned to the city in the 1950s. Only a decade before the artist captured this scene London was a very different place with shrouded street lamps and dimmed car headlights. Trevelyan celebrates a city liberated from post war restrictions, a great city returning to life.

Trevelyan’s depiction of light and reflection is essential to the success of the composition. Extravagant brushstrokes loosely describe the scene, the large white starbursts dominate, the exaggerated halos of street lights in the rain at night, mimicking the fiesta fireworks he had seen on his travels around Europe. Pinpoints of bright colour indicate cars and traffic lights, nothing is static.

Julian Trevelyan first found his artistic voice in 1930s Paris amongst the Surrealists, working at Stanley Hayter’s celebrated etching studio alongside Picasso, Miro, Giacometti and others. He settled in 1935 in his famous riverside studio in Hammersmith, where he remained for the rest of his life. After war service as a camouflage artist Trevelyan embarked on extensive travels throughout Europe and North America, accompanied by his second wife the artist Mary Fedden. He was a most versatile and accomplished painter, poet, printmaker and teacher, absorbed by his deeply personal interpretation of London and Londoners, blending observation with vivid imagination.

This newly rediscovered painting was acquired in London some 50 years ago and has been in the same Scottish family ever since.

Private collection, U.K.

As dusk descends and a dense night sky closes in, three bathers emerge from the sea, showing no urgency to leave after their swim. Behind them, the horizon can be seen in the dying light. They neither communicate nor interact with one another, but dry themselves off in an unexpectedly pensive manner. We are provided with no visual cues to explain their sombre mood. In Western art, the male nude is typically presented as heroic and active, conforming to established ideals of virility and masculinity; Vaughan’s conception, by contrast, is passive and introspective.
Group of Bathers demonstrates certain technical advances in Vaughan’s handling of oil paint and use of colour. The stiffness and awkward modelling evident in his earlier work give way to a more confident application of pigment. The figures are rendered with tactile richness, as patches of evening light penetrate the overhanging branches and fall across their bodies. The illumination of their dappled skin incorporates a range of colours – iron ochre, Prussian blue, orange and cadmium yellow – producing decorative complexity and physical immediacy.
Although absorbed in quiet, private actions, the figures are nonetheless presented as young and virile. The treatment of their limbs suggests their bodies are capable of athletic and energetic movement. The sinuous, repeated arcs of back, spine and outstretched arm are echoed elsewhere in the setting through rhyming curves. These organic rhythms are set against the formality of straight lines and angles, defining their towels spread out onthe geometrically shaped rocks.
The bathers, unaware of the viewer’s presence, exemplify a generic figure type that formed the basis of Vaughan’s conception of the male nude for several years: round-headed, youthful, long-limbed and contemplative. In the foreground, one raises an arm while crossing his torso with the other, as if drying himself with an invisible towel; his left leg is modelled through subtle modulations of shadow drawn from the surrounding blues. The thick-thighed profile figure at the left quietly dries his hands, head bowed in concentration. The central figure, last to emerge from the rockpool, adopts a pose that recurs frequently in Vaughan’s work, appearing in paintings such as Stooping Bather, completed the same year. This pose serves three functions. The vertical supporting leg anchors the figure. The other bent leg suggests movement and vitality, while introducing a sense of restrained eroticism.

Peter Gimpel
Mrs L. Coleman
Mrs Gillian Raffles
Anthony Hepworth, Bath
Prof. J. Ball
Private collection, U.K.
Private collection, U.K.

Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, London, 1962, cat. no. 128 (ill. pl. XXI)
A. Hepworth, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, exhibition catalogue, London, 2007, p. 16 (ill.)
A. Hepworth, The Hargreaves and BallTrust Selected Works, London, 2010, p. 6 (ill.)

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, University of Durham, Hatton Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, 1956, no. 18 (where titled Bathers); touring exhibition, Arts Council, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, 1957
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, 1962, cat. no. 128
London, Olympia Fine Art and Antiques Fair, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings, 2002, no. 472
Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, 2007, cat. no. 7
Anthony Hepworth, London, The Hargreaves and Ball Trust Selected Works, 2010
Chichester, Pallant House, Keith Vaughan: Romanticism to Abstraction, 2012

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.

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

Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, London, 1962, pl. xxvii (ill. – not exhibited)

A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p. 86, cat. no. 163 (ill. b&w)

London, Leicester Galleries, Keith Vaughan: Paintings, 1953, cat. no. 7

London, Olympia Fine Art and Antiques Fair, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings, 2002, no. 431

Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, 2007 cat. no. 17

Leicester Galleries, London, 1959

New Art Centre, London

Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath

The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection, U.K.

Vaughan painted two landscapes entitled Iowa Farm, both the same size and worked in oil on board. In 1959, he was appointed Painter in Residence at Iowa State University, where he worked for six months and gained much-needed stimulation from colleagues and students. During this period, he produced a series of landscapes in both oils and gouaches, each marked by a heightened sense of formal structure and design. The optimism he encountered in American painting fostered a new expressive eloquence in his handling of pigment, encouraging him to move beyond the restraint that had characterised much of his earlier work.
In Iowa Farm II, Vaughan achieves a precise balance between the figurative and the abstract. The composition grows from observed motifs (barn doors, tree boughs, gable ends, distant foliage and foreground fields), yet these are not described directly. Instead, they are distilled into structural blocks and interlocking planes, translating the features of the countryside into a rigorous formal language. Pastoral details become the scaffolding for an exploration of rhythm, balance and spatial tension, revealing Vaughan’s ability to reconcile observed reality with modernist formal concerns.

Private collection
Redfern Gallery, London
Anthony & Madeleine Carter (1960s)
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel, London

A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol,2012, p. 115, no. AH293

London, Matthiesen Gallery, Recent Paintings and Sculpture, 1962

Like many artists, Keith Vaughan often turned to Ancient Greece as a source of inspiration, as a way to position himself within a respected art-historical canon, and to licence subversive material in his artworks. Vaughan’s ambition was to constructing a notion of universal humanity in his works. As the classical world has long been considered the birthplace of Western civilisation, and Greek mythology contains many foundational narratives, antiquity can act as a means of representing some sort of common human experience. Simultaneously, Vaughan, under the notion of “Greek Love” used the Greek landscape and mythological scenes to express his desires, as a gay man. Vaughan struggled throughout his life with reconciling his personal impulses with the monumental aims of his work and used the ancient world to express this duality.

Mythological narratives are also often found in his works. In Study for Laocoon Group VIII, Vaughan references the myth of Laocoön, a Trojan priest who was killed alongside his two sons by a giant serpent as divine punishment, most famously depicted in the ancient statue Laocoon and His Sons, produced between 27 BC and AD 68. The statue’s art-historical significance, often considered ‘the prototypical icon of human agony’ in Western art, would have appealed to Vaughan’s desire to represent universal experiences and emotions in his work. However, the artist himself also wrote that ‘for him… [the idea behind the Laocoon myth] is that it represents… man’s conflict with his environment… with himself’ and the evils of temptation. Therefore, Vaughan’s reimagining of the Laocoön Group could also be an exploration of his personal struggle with experiencing homosexual desire in the era in which he lived.

Sir Misha Black
Private Collection
Offer Waterman and Co., London
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan – The Mature Oils, 1846-1977, Samson & Company, 2014, cat. no. AH456, p. 161 (ill.)

London, Marlborough New London Gallery, Keith Vaughan New Paintings, no. 23