London Art Fair: Islington 2023

The Artist

Private Collection, Canada (purchased from the above)

Osborne Samuel London

Coppel, Stephen. Linocuts of the Machine Age: Claude Flight and the Grosvenor School. (Scolar Press, Aldershot: 1995). no. SA 13

Leaper, Hana. Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue. (Lund Humphries, Surrey: 2015). no. 15.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints: Collectors’ Collections,” February 19, 2020–October 5, 2020. (another copy)

Printed from 3 blocks in Chinese orange, spectrum red and Prussian blue

Lumley Cazalet Gallery, London
Private British Collection
Private collection
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Konody, Observor, June 4, 1933, p.10

Stephen Coppel, Linocuts of the Machine Age, published by Scolar Press, 1995, SA 27, p.113

Hana Leaper, Sybil Andrews Linocuts: A Complete Catalogue, published by Lund Humphries in Association with Osborne Samuel, 2015, no.29, p.75

London, Redfern Gallery, 1933, no.46

Melbourne, 1937, no.43

Linocut printed on buff oriental oriental laid tissue in 3 blocks: Chinese orange; permanent blue; Chinese blue

The Windmill was inspired by Elmers Mill, an old Suffolk post windmill at the village of Woolpit, near Bury St Edmunds. The mill is also the subject of Cyril Power’s first known linocut, Elmer’s Mill, Woolpit (1921).

The artist

Private Collection, London

The Artist

The Artist

Private Collection, New York, by 1959

Private Collection, 2003

Grosvenor Gallery, London, 2004
Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel London

Colin Ralph, The Colin Collection: Paintings, Watercolours, Drawings and Sculpture collected by Mr. & Mrs. Ralph F. Colin, New York, 1960
Margaret Garlake, New Art, New World: British Art in Postwar Society, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998
Margaret Garlake, The sculpture of Reg Butler, Henry Moore Foundation in Association with Lund Humphries, 2006, cat no.176, illustrated Fig 35, p.43

Hanover Gallery, May-June 1957 (Cat 34.)
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, February 1959 (cat, 14)
J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, Oct.-Dec. 1963, Reg Butler, A Retrospective Exhibition, cat 67

Butler was a man with two distinct, yet highly accomplished, careers. As Cottrell, Butler he was an architect with a burgeoning practice, while as Reg he was an essentially untrained avant-garde sculptor, having only worked briefly as an assistant in Henry Moore’s studio in 1947 and tried his hand as a blacksmith during the war, whose idiosyncratic style and experimental approach drew the attention of contemporary artists and critics alike. While exhibiting at both the 1952 and 1954 Venice Biennales he made a significant contribution to Herbert Read’s defining concept of post-war art, the so-called ‘Geometry of Fear’, and was also talent spotted by international gallerists such as Curt Valentin in New York and later Pierre Matisse.
Figure in Space is one of Butler’s finest explorations into the human figure. His architectural background provided him with a sensitive understanding of the relationship between form and space, an understanding which he applied to strong effect through the creation of cage-like structures, such as that visible here, which are very similar to those used by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon in their work. In this instance the structures surrounding the atrophied human figure provide the sculpture with an extraordinary sense of movement while also referencing the spruing which surround bronzes in the initial stages of the casting process. By drawing our attention to the making process itself Butler draws our attention to the artificiality of the human figure and encourages a detached, Existentialist, standpoint. Butler explained this to Pierre Matisse: ‘to me the so-called base…is a very important part of the total sculpture – it isn’t merely a base but I’m sure does things to the meaning of the whole thing’ (letter to Pierre Matisse, November 1966, quoted in Pierre Matisse and His Artists (exh. cat)., The Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York, 2002, p.128).
Pierre Matisse was quick to sign Reg Butler into his stable of artists after the Curt Valentin Gallery closed in 1955, although Matisse struggled to develop a close working relationship with Erica Brausen who represented Butler in London. In March 1956 he included Butler in an exhibition alongside prestigious and established names such as Le Corbusier, Giacometti, Marino Marini and Joan Miro (among others), but it was not until February 1959 that he was able to stage a solo exhibition. It was not only Butler’s idiosyncratic approach to form which fascinated Matisse and ensured him a place in his prestigious gallery but also the sensuality of his figures which sat very well alongside those of Balthus and Maillol, who were regular features at the gallery.

Sir Colin & Lady Anderson, London 
Christie’s, London, November 18, 2005, lot 115
Private Collection, USA (Acquired at the above sale)
Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr & Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-1996, Stroud, 1997, no. C53S., illustration of another cast p. 363

The New Art Centre, London
Private Collection, U.K.

Frances Spalding, Prunella Clough: regions unmapped, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2012, p.131 pl. no. 84 (col.)

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Prunella Clough, September – October 1960, no. 74 (Arts Council), touring to City Art Gallery, York; College of Art, Bournemouth; Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry; Gracefield Arts Centre, Dumfries; Arts Council Gallery, Cambridge; Art Gallery, Blackburn; Art Gallery, Derby
Camden Art Centre, London, 2015

By the 1950s Clough had turned her attention away from beachscapes towards the urban environment and themes of labour.  The industrial landscape became a source of endless fascination for her, as Britain rebuilt and regenerated itself in the years following the war. She turned her gaze away from the shingle beaches of North Suffolk towards Thameside cranes, lorries on inner city building sites and workers in factories.

Chance encounters with discarded objects in builder’s yards or on construction sites now began to hold her attention. Configurations on a crumbling plaster wall or an arresting shape of an unidentified object outside a factory gate could produce surprising results. Wastelands and urban dereliction provided a series of new shapes, colours and textures and a catalogue of visual information with which to create her paintings. Clough made economical use of colour making it sing out from within the grids and meshes of her painted textures. 

The artist

A gift from the Artist to John Boulting (1913-1985), thence by descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.
Bonhams, Modern British and Irish Art, 14 Jun 2017

There is a study for the present work, by the same hand, verso. The composition relates to the 1954 painting Carnival Horse which Craxton painted on the Greek island of Poros.

The Estate of the Artist
Osborne Samuel, London

John Craxton: A Poetic Eye, Dorset County Museum, March-September 2015
Salisbury Museum, January-May 2016

The Artist’s Estate

Sale, Christie’s London, 7 June 1991, lot 207
Christopher Hull Gallery, London
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2018)
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Ian Collins (ed.), John Craxton, Lund Humphries, London, 2011, no. 165, illustrated, p. 136

Tokyo, Tokyo International Biennale, New Image in Painting, 1974, illustrated in the catalogue

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. At first Kenya (1970), then Tunisia (1971) and Morocco (1972). By 1973, the year Volcanic Landscape was painted, Craxton found himself on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands. Ian Collins comments on this time, ‘Craxton warmed to stark Lanzarote, with camels and peasants labouring in a black moonscape where each man-made crater held a single fig tree or vine. He added lava dust to the pigment for a series of literally gritty pictures.’ 1

It is this description which we are presented with in Volcanic Landscape. The lava dust has been liberally and thickly applied to create interesting textures and depth to the picture surface. The single, sparse tree winds its way up through the centre of the composition, above which a prehistoric bird commands the upper third. The goat lower centre, outlined in pink and feeding on the lone tree, reminds us of Craxton’s love affair with Greece.

The whole painting is infused with a dream-like atmosphere as the psychedelic sky with its pink, yellow and green pigments and blazing sun, highlights the ancient volcanic scene below.

1  Ian Collins, John Craxton, Lund Humphries, 2011, p.132

Private Collection, France

After the successes of the 1950s, a decade when Feiler enjoyed four highly acclaimed solo exhibitions with his London dealers The Redfern Gallery, the German-born artist sacrificed a safe commercial formula for a new and challenging style of painting fit for the 1960s.

Though ensconced in a long teaching career in Bristol – in 1963 Feiler became Head of Painting at the newly formed Bristol Polytechnic – this talented painter continued to use Cornish landscape themes.

Teaching obviously offered a financial alternative to the need to sell paintings. The temporary dip in his commercial fortunes at the turn of the 1960s, epitomised by the start of a 25 year hiatus in his relationship with the Redfern, can retrospectively be seen as symptomatic of a challenging artist on the creative move and one step ahead of his audience.

There was always a logical sequence at play in the artist’ s stylistic development. The large oval motifs of many early 1960s pictures like ‘ Pierced Vertical’ gradually become streamlined and formalised towards what, by the second half of the decade, is the hard-edged geometry of the Orbis canvases.

Private Collection, USA

Craig Hartley 55; Starr Figura 76

Sarah Howgate 123; Sebastian Smee 1

William Feaver 66; Yale 41

Toby Treves, Lucian Freud: Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints, published by Modern Art Press, 2022, No. 80, illustrated p.207

London, National Portrait Gallery, Lucian Freud: Portraits, 9 Feb – 27 May 2012, illustrated p.197, another impression

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings, 16 Dec 2007 – 10 Mar 2008, illustrated p. 76, another impression

Lucian Freud was one of the most significant portraitists of the last century, acclaimed Internationally. His portraits are both ruthless, coldblooded examinations and yet also intimate and impartial. This seemingly contradictory approach stemmed from seeing himself as “a sort of biologist”, interested in “the insides and undersides of things.” ₁

He refused to work from photographs as he stated, “the aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell.”₂ Sitters had to be patient and prepared to be nocturnal, so inevitably this led to self-portraits. Freud depicted mirror images of himself throughout the breadth of his career and often referred to this process in titles, such as in the etching, Self-Portrait: Reflection. 

This etching is an extraordinary portrait and display of technical command, the artist as in so many portraits, naked, filling the large plate from the chest upwards. Freud stood his copper plates upright on an easel from the mid 1980’s onwards and found he was able to work with greater force and fluidity. He claimed to find etching easier than drawing.

Self-Portrait: Reflection is uncompromising, the irregularities of the surface and lack of balance to his features are laid bare. The artist’s eyes scarcely visible but piercing, self-examining and yet also boring into the viewer.  

Freud stated, “Many people are inclined to look at portraits not for the art in them but to see how they resemble people. This seems to me a profound misunderstanding.” ₃

Frank Auerbach began to unravel this ‘misunderstanding’ in the Tate catalogue that accompanied Freud’s retrospective of 2002:

‘When I think of the work of Lucian Freud, I think of Lucian’s attention to his subject. If his concentrated interest were to falter he would come off his tightrope; he has no safety net of manner. Whenever his way of working threatens to become a style, he puts it aside like a blunted pencil and finds a procedure more suited to his needs.I am never aware of the aesthetic paraphernalia. The subject is raw, not cooked to be more digestible as art, not covered in a gravy of ostentatious tone or colour, nor arranged on the plate as a ‘composition.’ The paintings live because their creator has been passionately attentive to their theme, and his attention has left something for us to look at. It seems a sort of miracle.’₄

₁ Royal Academy Blog, 22^nd October 2019
₂ Lucian Freud: A Life, David Dawson and Mark Holborn, published by Phaidon, 2019
₃ Freud cited in Cape, J., Freud at Work, Alfred Knopf, New York, 2006, p. 32
₄ William Feaver, Lucian Freud, Tate Publishing, 2002, p.51

Terry Dintenfass, Inc., New York
Private Collection, USA

Osborne Samuel, London

James Fitzsimmons, Elisabeth Frink, Art International, vol. 232, no. 2, May 1979, p. 19 (another example illustrated)
Bryan Robertson, Elisabeth Frink Sculpture Catalogue Raisonné, Salisbury, 1984, no. 220, pp. 108, 185 (another example illustrated)
Edward Lucie-Smith, Frink A Portrait, London, 1994, p. 46 (another example illustrated)
Elisabeth Frink: Memorial Exhibition, exh. cat., Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 11 June – 29 August 1994, p. 31 (another example illustrated, p. 14)
Stephen Gardiner, Frink The Official Biography of Elisabeth Frink, London, 1998, p. 187 (another example illustrated, p. 203)
Annette Ratuszniak ed., Elisabeth Frink, Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture 1947-93, London, 2013, no. FCR 248, p. 130 (another example illustrated)

Winchester, Great Courtyard, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture in Winchester, 17 July – 13 September 1981 (another example exhibited)
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Elisabeth Frink Sculpture and Drawings, 1952 – 1984, 8 February – 24 March 1985, p. 52 (another example exhibited and illustrated, pp. 17, 25)
Washington D.C., The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Elisabeth Frink: Sculpture and Drawings 1950 – 1990, 1990, pp. 8-9, 65 (another example exhibited and illustrated)

Conceived in 1975, Dame Elisabeth Frink’s series of Tribute Heads explore themes of suffering and endurance, inspired by the work of Amnesty International and the stoic resolve of the nameless figures around the world who have been persecuted as a result of their beliefs. The artist began this series shortly after her return to London following a number of years living in France, continuing her exploration into the same forms and subjects that had underpinned her Goggle Heads and Soldiers’ Heads sculptures. For Frink, the head was a conduit through which she could channel an array of emotions, one which allowed her to delve into the internal psychological landscape of her figures. As she explained: ‘Heads have always been very important to me as vehicles for sculpture. A head is infinitely variable. It’s complicated, and it’s extremely emotional. Everyone’s emotions are in their face. It’s not surprising that there are sculptures of massive heads going way back, or that lots of other artists besides myself have found the subject fascinating’ (E. Frink, quoted in E. Lucie-Smith, Frink: A Portrait, London, 1994, p. 125). Through subtle alterations from figure to figure in this series, Frink captures an insightful glimpse into the full emotional impact these experiences have on the individuals involved.
Pairing the features back to the minimal suggestion of its essential forms, the artist focuses our attention on the figure’s highly nuanced expression, eloquently conveying a careful balance of tension and serenity in their face. In this way, the figure at the heart of the present work retains a poise and dignity, as they defiantly face their torment. Frink, reflecting on this aspect of the Tribute heads, explained: ‘they are the victims, except that they are not crumpled in any sense … they’re not damaged. They’ve remained whole. No, I think they’re survivors really. I look at them as survivors who have gone through to the other side’ (E. Frink, National Life Stories: Artists’ Lives interview with Sarah Kent).

Waddington Galleries, London 
Peter Stuyvesant Foundation
Belgrave Gallery, London
Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above, 2001)
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Alan Bowness, Recent British Paining, 1988, page 60, Illustrated No 22

Galerie Charles Linehard, Zurich, Terry Frost 1963;
North Carolina Museum of Art, Young British Painters, 1964
Bolton Art Gallery 1966-67 (on loan)
Tate Gallery, London, Recent British Painting, 1967, No 22
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Recent British Paintings, 1970
Gillian Jason Gallery, London, Terry Frost, 1988, No11

In 1963 Frost moved with his young family from St Ives to Banbury. While looking at the area, a year earlier, he had discovered Compton Wynwates, a Tudor house belonging to the Marquis of Northampton. Inside he saw a Cromwellian chair upholstered in ‘unforgettable blue’ against the black of the wood which, with the space between its legs, looked like a piece of sculpture. The chapel outside contained flags that had been carried in the battle of Edge Hill. One of them, ‘fragile as a spider’s web’, had black chevrons with blue circles all round. As Frost left, he saw, in the peeling layers of the plaster, a blue full moon on the wall:

These experiences were so moving they have affected my paintings ever since. I came home and painted a grey, mixing my oils in such a way that I could get a black craze, and then I ran that blue through it; it had to be a single wet stroke and absolutely accurate; and there it was. What I had experienced gave a whole new meaning to chevrons for me, and new meanings for circles as well.[1]

These shapes would accrue new significance during Frost’s years in Banbury, when he became fascinated by the town’s preponderance of road signs. Yet while the mid-1960s’ paintings gained a colourful, emphatic energy from such experiences, earlier examples, such as Blue, Black Arrow (1962) have a focused intensity.

The canvas of Blue, Black Arrow is divided into three sectors. A circle and ellipse fill the blue segment, the lower right area is colourfully striped, while the upper grey sector is traversed by a black, blue-tipped, arrow. These elements impel the downward motion of the composition, which is further animated by the pendulous ellipse and thrust of the arrow. Throughout, energy radiates from the multiplication of outlines, in shades of blue, aquamarine, turquoise, red and yellow.

Blue, Black Arrow was one of two paintings by Frost (with Red and Black, 1961) acquired for the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, whose collection aimed to represent British artists at a formative point in their career. The parameters were that no painting should be earlier than 1951, and no artist younger than those included in the seminal ‘Young Generation’ exhibition, sponsored by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1964. Just three years later, in 1967, the collection was shown in its entirety at the Tate as ‘Recent British Painting’, an exhibition that toured to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

[1] Terry Frost, interview with David Lewis (July 1993), quoted in David Lewis, Terry Frost (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), p. 101.

‘NORTH BY NEW ENGLISH’, MAY-AUGUST 2017, NO 37′

The Artist

The Estate of the Artist

Osborne Samuel, London

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above 2012)

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.

From the edition of 9

Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London
Private Collection, UK  (purchased from the above 2006)

The Leicester Galleries, London, 2 February 1962
Private Collection, U.K.
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Woodland became a key feature of Hitchens’ paintings from the early 1940s onwards, following the family’s move to Lavington Common, Sussex, after his studio in Belsize Park was badly damaged by a bomb. This was a turning point for the artist, having escaped London to the seclusion and tranquillity of the countryside and surrounded by nature, his work took on a fresh spontaneity that is particularly evident in this painting.

Peter Khoroche noted:

“About Yellow Autumn from a Terrace -there is a note in IH’s Despatch Book, under Summer 1949, to the effect that certain pictures from the Leicester Galleries were transferred to the Leger Galleries at this time. Among these was Yellow Autumn from a Terrace. So we can be sure that it was painted before Summer 1949. I think ‘ca.1948’ would be a reasonable guess as to when it was painted.”

Taking a horizontal canvas, often propped low in front of him, Hitchens worked in the open air from landscapes hemmed close by foliage, bracken and the dank mass of water. He had moved to Greenleaves, six acres of woodland in Lavington, Sussex, following the bombing of his London studio. Never finding a reason to leave, he continued to paint its seasons, finding infinite variety where others might hardly register change.

Hitchens frequently drew analogy with music to describe his approach to painting, referring to the instruments in the ‘ painter’ s orchestra’ , a picture’ s rhythm and harmony, or the notation of tones and colours necessary to its ‘ visual music’ .1 Yet if his canvases are scanned, in the same way as musical scores, the attentive viewer soon notices that Hitchens’ calligraphic strokes are precise rather than bravura , the balancing of tone to unpainted canvas as calculated as that of an experienced orchestrator.

In Yellow Autumn from a Terrace , Hitchens creates a foreground scaffolding of tree trunks, arched brambles, shrubs, the suggested curlicues of ironwork, letting the eye find its own way towards chinks of cerulean-grey. As Christopher Neve wrote,

“…nature seemed to consist to [Hitchens] more of spaces than of objects, and it often appears that he instinctively drew the air and light that vibrates in the interstices of the view rather than the view itself.”2

1. Ivon Hitchens, Statement in Ark (1956), based on notes made a decade earlier.

2. Christopher Neve, ‘ Ivon Hitchens: Music’ , in Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th Century English Painting (Faber, 1990), p. 139.

Estate of the Artist

Osborne Samuel, London

Private Collection, UK

Catherine Kinley & Marco Livingstone ‘Peter Kinley’, 2010, illustrated page 15, no 11

Born in Austria to a Jewish father and Protestant German mother, Kinley was sent for safety to England in 1938, not seeing his parents again until 1946. He studied at Düsseldorf Academy (1948–9), then St Martin’s School of Art (1949–53), in 1951 receiving special mention in the annual exhibition of ‘Young Contemporaries’. The following February, at the Matthiesen Gallery, Kinley saw the first exhibition in Britain of paintings by Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955). Like so many British painters, Kinley was profoundly affected by de Staël’s work, neatly summarised by Basil Taylor as ‘mosaic-like pictures built from roughly shaped rectangles of pigment applied with an extraordinarily rich and varied impasto’. ₁ Just two years later, Gimpel Fils – one of London’s most prestigious venues for contemporary art – gave Kinley, still in his twenties, his first solo exhibition. ²

The New Year had barely begun, in 1957, when ‘Statements’ opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Aiming both to review the condition of British abstract art and to demonstrate the impact of the previous year’s ‘Modern Art in the United States’, at the Tate, the result was an almost defiant diversity. Twenty-one artists submitted a single work with a statement. Alan Davie wrote on Zen Buddhism, Kenneth and Mary Martin on the significance of mathematics; Barbara Hepworth wrote a poem. Kinley’s work, praised as among the best, was ‘luxuriously painted … containing a dilatorily conceived nude which had less “presence” than the paint’. ₃ His statement, meanwhile, assessed and dismissed the various stylistic options available: Action Painting as philosophically inadequate, and constructivist art as ‘only of academic interest’. ₄

Landscape (1957) shows Kinley at precisely this moment, retaining his commitment to the spirit of de Staël, and to art’s ‘subject’, however freely considered. He had submitted a seascape to the Contemporary Arts Society’s 1956 themed exhibition ‘The Seasons’, and would continue to explore the implications of placing a figure within an interior setting. In Landscape (1957), he depicts a coastal subject broadly in planes of blue-grey, pale gold, gunmetal and green. The structure and texture of the lowest elements – water, rock, hillside – are related with tactile exigency, the occasional drip drawing attention to their material surface. It is only with the sky that Kinley loosens his control of structure, paralleling the sweep of the landscape with strokes that materialise air’s movement and the glint, behind cloud, of light.

In the Arts Council’s collection is an earlier Seascape (1954), comparable in scale, and similarly juxtaposing blocks of blue, black and gold, but which suggests a more rigid approach to landscape. The slabs of colour are edged by black or white, thus hemming and confining their intensity. By contrast, Landscape (1957) has an exhilarating immediacy: undeniably structured, it uses paint to express the mass of landscape, the weight of the sea and lightness of air.

₁ Basil Taylor, ‘Limited Gift’, The Spectator, Vol. 196, Issue 6672 (11 May 1956), p. 655.

²  ‘Paintings by Peter Kinley; Recent Paintings by Sandra Blow’, Gimpel Fils, London (May 1954).

₃ Robert Melville, ‘Exhibitions’, The Architectural Review, Vol. 121, No. 723 (April 1957), p. 269.

₄ Kinley, quoted in Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, The Paul Mellow Centre for Studies in British Art, 1998), p. 59.

The Artist

Gifted to Maureen & James Tower

James Tower (1919-1988) was a ceramic artist. He studied at the Bath Academy, Corsham, and he and his wife Maureen will have known Lanyon who taught there.

The Artist, until 1965
Private Collection, UK
Osborne Samuel, London

John Rothenstein, British Art Since 1900 , Phaidon, London, 1962, pl.145 (ill.b&w, another cast, where dated 1952)
Alan Bowness, Bernard Meadows, Sculpture and Drawings , Lund Humphries, London, 1995, p.138, cat.no.BM28

British Pavilion, XXXII Biennale 1964, Venice, unnumbered, (ill.b&w, another cast as Crab, where dated 1952)
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Roger Hilton, Gwyther Irwin, Bernard Meadows, Joe Tilson , 13 May-21 June 1965, unnumbered (this cast, where dated 1952); this exhibition travelled to Zagreb, Modern Gallery, Berlin, Kunstamt Reinickendorf, Museen der Stadt Recklinghausen and Kunstverein Braunschweig (this cast)

A key figure of post-war British sculpture, Bernard Meadows came to prominence as part of what is now referred to as the ‘Geometry of Fear’ generation of sculptors. He exhibited internationally throughout his career and is now represented in the permanent collections of major museums such as the Guggenheim, Hirshhorn and Tate.

Following a very brief and unsuccessful spell as a trainee accountant, Meadows enrolled at the Norwich School of Art aged 19. In his second year it was arranged for three selected students to pay a visit to Henry Moore’s Hampstead studio. Moore, so impressed by Meadows, sent him a postcard the following day asking if he may like to assist him for the upcoming Easter holidays. Meadows gladly accepted and, bar the war years, he would remain Moore’s assistant until 1948. During the war Meadows volunteered for the Royal Air Force and in 1943 was posted to India, including an extended period on the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. Counting surrealism and Picasso amongst his early influences and having learnt both the craft and sensibilities required of a sculptor from Moore, it was Meadows’ experience of these islands, and particularly their wildlife, which was to become an important marker in developing his own artistic development. The Cocos have a prevalent community of all manner of crabs which fascinated Meadows; tree crabs, large tank crabs, mosquito crabs, which although must have seemed alien at first became a most familiar feature of day to day life.

Following the end of the war Meadows returned to Britain and although he initially continued to work for Moore, by 1950 he developed his own sculpture. At first these were biomorphic abstractions akin to Moore’s work but he quickly moved into new territory with abstracted bird forms and in 1952 his first crab (Black Crab, Tate, London). Like the present cast, these works are at first animal yet remain not entirely removed from the preceding humanoid forms thus allowing an interpretation of representation of the human experience. In 1951 Meadows featured in the Festival of Britain to acclaim but his presence on the international stage was very much cemented by his inclusion in the now fabled exhibition in the British Pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale, New Aspects of British Sculpture. This exhibition championed the work of Meadows and seven other young contemporaries (Adams, Armitage, Butler, Chadwick, Clarke, Paolozzi and Turnbull). These artists worked in a more rough and ready aesthetic than the then established mode and shared a common concern borne from memories of war horrors witnessed just years earlier and the fear induced by the developing Cold War. Herbert Read penned the catalogue introduction from which the nomenclature for the group derived:

These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, or ragged claws ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.

Belonging to this period is Large ‘Jesus’ Crab, so called as the first cast was acquired by Jesus College, Cambridge. The piece is believed to be based on the form of the male Fiddler crab; a fast-moving specimen, with a cocoon-like body, raised on angular legs and possessing two eyes on stalks (which Meadows’ has moved underneath) and one greatly outsized claw that it raises aloft in a mating display. It perfectly suits Meadow’s requirements for his representation of human concern; composed of hardened shell over tender flesh, in a state of both threat and defence.

The present cast remained in Meadows’ possession until at least 1965, and latterly entered the collection of Tony Paterson. Paterson was a lawyer and through his friendship with Bryan Robertson, who he met at Toynbee Hall in the 1950s, he became much involved with the contemporary art scene from the 1960s when it is thought that he acquired this sculpture. He provided legal advice to the Air Gallery, Space (an organization to provide studios for young artists), the New Contemporaries and was Honorary Solicitor to the Contempory Art Society. Casts of the half scaled maquette for the present work are in the collection of the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath and the Tate Gallery, London.

The Artist
George Dix, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Thence by descent
Private collection, Virginia
Osborne Samuel, London

University of Virginia Museum of Fine Art, February 1949

A major figure in the neo-Romantic movement of the 1940s and 50s, English painter John Minton was also an abundantly gifted graphic artist and prolific illustrator. His commissions spanned book illustration, dust-jacket design, illustrations for magazines and journals, advertising, commercial posters for film, wallpapers, theatre design and importantly a large canvas commissioned for the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain. Notable projects also include illustrations for food writer Elizabeth David’s French Country Cooking, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Alan Ross’s Time Was Away, and Kay Dick’s An Affair of Love.

Minton was clearly influenced by the previous generation of Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland. As Gerard Hastings wrote in his essay for our exhibition in 2018, the impulse was to preserve picturesque scenery and to locate a poetic vision among our home-grown hops and thistles. A distinct nostalgia for something familiar that might soon disappear. The Fisherman is a wonderful example of this.

This drawing previously owned by George Dix who was stationed in London during the Second World War and remained there for a time afterwards. During this period in England, he befriended many of the luminaries of mid-century British culture, among them Minton, Wells, Vaughan and Piper, along with the famed sculptor Henry Moore. He maintained these relationships even after his return to America, where he worked as a partner in the New York office of the bi-continental gallery Durlacher Brothers. In Manhattan, Dix remained part of the intelligentsia, enjoying the company and friendship of Gore Vidal and Leonard Bernstein, among others.

The artist’s family
Osborne Samuel, London

Illustrated Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn (1985)

Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn (1985)
Crane Kalman Gallery, London (1986)
Gillian Jason Gallery, London (1990)
Bridge Gallery, Dublin (1997)
Penwith Gallery, St Ives (1996)

The context of St Ives, where Denis Mitchell lived from 1930 until the late 1960s, was critical to his creative development. Trained as a painter, he undertook piecemeal employment as his young family grew, working as a market gardener, fisherman and tin miner. In 1949 he became principal assistant to Barbara Hepworth, and that same year he carved the work he regarded as his first sculpture. Ballet Dancer, which was admired by Ben Nicholson, abstracts gently from the human form, rendering it as two stacked rhomboids, pierced to indicate the dancer’s angled legs and raised arms. From some angles a body is clearly discernible, but as it turns, the outline dissolves into abstraction, to become an exquisitely balanced combination of forms.

In 1952 Mitchell’s work was exhibited in ‘The Mirror and the Square’, at the New Burlington Galleries in London, alongside sculpture by Hepworth, Chadwick and Caro. The exhibition aimed to explore the urgent issues of realism versus abstraction, although its extent and diversity proved too great for most to draw any firm conclusions. Yet Mitchell’s adherence to abstraction was already clear. During his ten years as Hepworth’s principal assistant, he would hone his instinct for carving and the purity of form, exploring the abstract implications of enfolding, modular or asymmetrical structures, even when his titles implied figurative origins.

When Mitchell turned to bronze in the 1960s, by necessity using a local sand-casting foundry at St Just, he brought a remarkable degree of sophistication to the process, filing and polishing the somewhat rough casts to create sculptures that were both elegant and aesthetically unified. Patrick Heron, in his introduction to Mitchell’s exhibition at the Marjorie Parr Gallery in 1969, wrote,

… a Mitchell is a form, usually a single, rather streamlined form, enclosed as it were by a single skin … In such art, intuition and intellect are always inextricably locked. ₁

Roseveor (1985), a woodcarving, exemplifies this premise. The split monolith appeared as a formal device in Mitchell’s work in the early 1960s, around the same time that John Hoskin (like Mitchell, a one-time member of the artists’ cricket team at St Ives) was also exploring its form. Hoskin used welded steel to create a series of linear split columns. Mitchell, essentially a carver, created volumetric forms which curve and taper, ‘conceived’, as Heron recalled, ‘under the maker’s hand’. ₂

Mitchell had worked with assistants since the early 1960s, among them Breon O’Casey. By the mid-1980s his assistant was Tommy Rowe, like Mitchell a fisherman, a sculptor and former assistant to Hepworth. Mitchell returned to earlier sketchbooks for ideas, choosing those he now felt he could alter and perhaps improve. Roseveor thus relates to Argos (1974), as well as to Boscawen (1962), sculptures with an upright form and a characteristic ‘U’ or ‘V’ shape. Detecting in Mitchell’s sculpture an affinity with Nicholson, whose white reliefs were carved from a single piece of wood, then meticulously painted in coat after coat of Ripolin paint (‘always getting to the heart of things with practicalities’), O’Casey nonetheless discerned the greater influence of painters such as John Wells or Roger Hilton:

There is a shape of Roger Hilton’s, a large lump with two uneven horns, that you can see, for example in [Mitchell’s] Geevor, or Talland. ₃

Mitchell seldom used yew for his carvings, the only other known instance being Torso, dating from 1951. Yew possesses a characteristic warmth, orange-brown to purple in colour, with a natural lustre and pronounced grain that can be seen clearly in Roseveor. Consummately carved, Roseveor also evokes a primal quality, redolent of the non-western carvings Mitchell admired and collected.

₁ Patrick Heron, introduction to ‘Denis Mitchell: Exhibition of Sculpture’, exhibition catalogue (London: Marjorie Parr Gallery, 1969).
₂ Heron, introduction to ‘Denis Mitchell: Exhibition of Sculpture’.
₃ Breon O’Casey, in Denis Mitchell and Friends, exhibition catalogue (Dublin: The Bridge Gallery, 1997), p. 11.

Waddington Galleries, London

The sheet is tipped to a painted Masonite board at the upper left and right corners. 

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Marlborough Fine Art, Rome
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

Private Collection, USA

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.

Redfern Gallery, London
Mrs Digby Morton (purchased from the above)
Thomas Agnew & Sons, London.
Christie’s, London, 1993

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above)

The Redfern Gallery, London
The Earl Jeffrey John Archer Amherst, 5th Earl Amherst
Private  Collector, USA (gift from the above, 1985)

Osborne Samuel, London

Reynolds’ intense study of nature led him to create sketchbooks filled with botanical studies, pressed leaves, grasses, seedpods and feathers – forms upon which he based abstract landscapes during the first, figurative stage of his career. Among the most significant sequence of paintings derived from these studies was ‘The Four Seasons’, showing landscape transformed across the cycle of the year.

Legend in December (1955) relates to this series, showing a winter landscape in which the moon hangs low over the horizon. Bushes cast pallid shadows, and whitened seed heads appear like fireworks against the sky. On the roof of a chapel, haloed, is a cross mirrored in a reflection below. This detail, coupled with the title Legend in December, suggests a memory of Christmas.

Robert Melville, writing in October 1955 about Reynolds’ forthcoming exhibition ‘The Four Seasons’ at the Redfern Gallery, acknowledged the artist’s debt to Samuel Palmer, but denied that he shared Palmer’s Christian outlook. Melville instead drew attention to a reading of landscape by the writer and naturalist Richard Jefferies, who described that being ‘aware of the sun overhead and the blue heaven, I feel that there is nothing between me and space. This is the verge of a gulf, and a tangent from my feet goes straight unchecked into the unknown. It is the edge of the abyss as much if the earth were cut away in a sheer fall of eight thousand miles to the sky beneath’.¹

This same sense of space permeates Legend in December, which places the horizon low within the composition to emphasise an immense sky.

¹ Richard Jefferies (1848–87), quoted in Robert Melville, ‘Alan Reynolds’, Apollo, Vl. 62 No. 368, (October 1955), p. 100–101.

Redfern Gallery, London
Dr Lederman, 1953 (purchased from the above)
Piccadilly Gallery, London
HJE Haggard, 1961 (purchased from the above)
Private Collection, UK

Alan Reynolds, Redfern Gallery, London, 1953

Moth Barn in the Fenlands of East Anglia is a subject Reynolds often returned to. There are several recorded versions of the same view including a watercolour in the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge. One of the three finished oil paintings is in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Alan Reynolds’ solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, in February 1953, consolidated an impressive early reputation, featuring landscapes of abstracted trees and foliage: compositions formalised into ‘silhouettes of almost Chinese assurance and decisiveness’.¹ Even before the exhibition opened, Sir Kenneth Clark had reserved the large-scale painting, Moth Barn II, September Morning (1952), for the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Reynolds made numerous paintings on the theme of ‘moth barn’, in addition to a lithograph dating from 1956. Moth Barn Interior 3 (1952) is a diminutive variation, beautifully composed from a mirroring of spiked and curved foliage, whose palette suggests winter: chalk whites and greys, with a leavening of green. Here, landscape is reduced to its bare bones, stripped of unnecessary or lush detail. Yet it is also eloquent, built upon a series of curves derived from a seed pod, expectant in the foreground. First bought in 1953 by Dr Manuel Lederman, a pioneer in the field of radiology, the painting was later acquired by the geologist H. J. E. Haggard.

¹ M.H. Middleton, ‘Alan Reynolds (Redfern)’, The Spectator (13 March 1953).

Gimpel Fils, London 
Galerie Angst + Orny, Munich, 1976
Christie’s, London, 24 May 2012, lot 171
Private Collection, UK

Munich, Galerie Angst + Orny, William Scott Gouachen, January – February 1976

Verified by the William Scott Foundation

Scott’s still lifes reduced a narrow canon of domestic objects to a set of outlines and solids, tilted parallel to the picture plane. If his method was avowedly to look at Cézanne through the eyes of Chardin, ₁ he brought to this vision a particularly British sensibility. David Sylvester encapsulated this tendency, neatly, as a ‘liking for strange shapes, queer, misshapen shapes, either abstracted or invented’. ² Typical, for Scott, would be the long-handled frying pan, but also lemons, grapes and, most frequently, pears.

Chelsea Suite No. 4 (1975) was exhibited in a selection of gouaches and oils at the Galerie Angst + Orny, in Munich, at the same time as an extensive retrospective of drawings at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. Hilton Kremer, reviewing the New York exhibition, drew attention to the trajectory of Scott’s still lifes:

In the earlier drawings, there is more attention lavished on representational detail – details constantly and eloquently subject to correction, revision and the shifting ambiguities of perception – whereas in the later drawings, there is a more intense concentration and simplification. Objects and light, together with the spaces they occupy, are transmuted into a bold orchestration of shapes, textures and tonalities. ₃

In Chelsea Suite No. 4, Scott distils his subject to the chalk silhouette of a plate, with a knife, lemon and two pears, against a charcoal-grey ground. Enigmatically, he crops the second pear to a marginal sliver, as if it has just rolled out of sight.

₁ William Scott, in William Scott: Paintings, Drawings and Gouaches 1938–71, exhibition catalogue (London: Tate Gallery, 1972).

² David Sylvester, ‘Sickert’, in About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948–96 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 155

₃ Hilton Kramer, ‘Art: Seeing an Emotion’s Shape’, New York Times (11 January 1975), p. 21.

Private Collection, Italy

Certificated issued by K. Sutherland, 1980

Linocuts of the Machine Age, Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, 1995, LT24

Cutting Edge: Modern British Print Making , Dulwich Picture Gallery, Philip Wilsons Publishers, , 2019, p.87

Printed from 3 blocks in dark blue, light brown & light blue.

Lill Tschudi was a Swiss artist (1911-2004) from the town of Schwanden in the municipality of Glarus. She saw an advertisement in The Studio magazine for classes at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London and enrolled there in December 1929.  She stayed for six months, learning a revolutionary new method of linocutting taught by the charismatic Claude Flight, a teacher and artist who ran a course on Tuesday afternoons. Tschudi became a good friend of Flight’s and his companion the artist Edith Lawrence. Her linocuts like many of her fellow students who attended Flight’s classes are concerned with rhythm, velocity and dynamism of modern life of the Jazz Age.

Sailor’s Holiday shows a group of sailors printed in blues, black and brown, the white being part of the blocks that are left uncut and un-inked. It is not known where the scene is but after her time in London Flight suggested she go to Paris to broaden her work.  She spent two months there each year and studied under Fernand Leger, Andre Lhote and Gino Severini. The image suggest Paris as the location; the central figure looks like an accordion player perhaps.  The linocut was made in an edition of 50 in the 1930s but a second edition was begun in 1984 for the US market on the strength of the revival of interest in the Grosvenor School linocuts.  This second edition is annotated ‘USA’ and numbered from 50 as well.

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.

Dr Patrick Woodcock, by whom gifted to the present owner
Private Collection, Ireland
Osborne Samuel London

Vaughan was familiar with Worbarrow Bay on the Isle of Purbeck and painted several works inspired by its craggy, limestone cliffs (see Purbeck Landscape 1963; Small Limestone Landscape, 1963 and Black Purbeck Landscape, 1964). The coastline is popular with sea divers, not least because of the dramatic underwater boulders and gullies and the wreck of a barge off Worbarrow Tout. The present work was inspired by an incident from the previous year. In the summer of 1963, Vaughan drove down to the Jurassic Coast specifically to hunt for new subjects. While sitting having a drink at the Swanage Hotel, he recorded in his journal an encounter with some sea divers that morning:

We drove down on Saturday through hideous traffic until at Romney we cut adrift & took byways through the New Forest. Blissful Isolation & open roads. Beer & Sandwiches at a little pub. There were perfect moments – the first view of Chapman’s Pool on Sunday morning, crossing the stubbly field near the farm, the low stone wall. And then the sudden unsuspected drop away & the bay far below, nearly deserted, china blue.

The scramble down – knee-breaking. So much further than it looks, the distances always deceptive in this landscape which was made for Mastodons. Then the group of skin divers which appeared from outer space, peeling on their incredibly erotic, skin tight rubbers, crutch piece, belt of lead, leggings, top piece, helmet & goggles. Then they set off face down on the water, dozens at a time, only their red periscopes showing. (Keith Vaughan, Journal XLIV – supplement, Swanage, July 29-31, 1963).

The group of figures are preparing for their dive. The standing, foreground figure, complete with flippers and swimming trunks, dominates the composition. Arms raised, he prepares to ‘peel on’ his gear. His friends stand or sit on a rock close by. The neutral palette indicates a grey overcast day and the patches of black and splashes of paint evoke the rubbery squelch of their diving suits. Areas of collage and hand-rendered lettering (these are not unknown elsewhere in Vaughan’s more improvisatory gouaches) can also be seen and add to the texture and inventive quality of the imagery.

Gerard Hastings

Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester
Private Collection, U.K. (acquired from the above)

Hepworth and Massey, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom and Company, Bristol, 2012, p.176, cat.no.AH505 (not illustrated)

Manchester, Tib Lane Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Paintings, Gouaches and Drawings, 1976

The landscape around Toppesfield in Essex is entirely lacking in scenic hills, notable characteristics, or traditionally picturesque features. But it was precisely this unspectacular quality that prompted Vaughan to buy a house there in 1964. Over a period of twenty years the surrounding fields and villages inspired more than a hundred oil paintings and dozens of gouaches. The hamlet of Gainsford End, an unassuming cluster of thatched cottages and agricultural buildings close by Vaughan’s house, spawned a rich series of oils including Gainsford End (1966), Gainsford End II (1970), Gainsford End Under Snow (1970), Gainsford End 1972, I & II (1972) and one of his final paintings, Gainsford End Farm, (1976). He had very specific ideas concerning his landscape painting:  

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 outside the window of my studio. Trees & sky & some man-made objects such as a house – that is enough to start the reaction. 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 an hour. 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.[1]

Vaughan considered this quality of familiarity to be part of a long tradition in landscape painting since, ‘English art arose in the north, from the romantic and mystical spirit of the Celts and the cunning and dexterity of the Saxons. It was an indoor art at first, and indeed it never ventured much further than the garden.’[2] His conception of landscape is never subservient to anything else; it does not function merely as a backcloth to man’s foreground activities. In his essay ‘A View of English Painting’, he states that it is important to achieve an experience of landscape painting: 

Landscape is not a setting or a background for something always much more important, but something complete in itself and adequate to express experience of life … the whole panorama of the earth’s surface … the silent growth of trees and plants, the unfolding of buds, the flash of rain on leaves, the sky and the night – the key to a mystery of human existence.[3]

Like all great Romantic painters, Vaughan made aesthetic paraphrases from nature, focussing on a specific or singular aspect of what he observed. When selected and translated with sensitivity, particulars such as the curve of a tree bough, a line of fields or an open barn door can have the potential to encapsulate wider, poetic and universal qualities. His picture-making process in Essex entailed immersing himself in nature and familiarizing himself with it to the point that its memory entered his nervous system sufficiently to coalesce into a painting. He took lengthy walks and recorded features of the terrain along the way with his camera and in his sketchbooks. He also drove around the quaintly named local villages – High Easter, Finchingfield, Tilbury-Juxta-Clare – pulling over to make preparatory drawings and studies. These aides-mémoire assisted in his process of refining and transforming the landscape. 

During the late 1960s and early 1970s Vaughan’s application was so expressive and his technique so eloquent that he employed oil paint, as we see here, not merely as an agent with which to describe the Essex landscape, but as a plastic equivalent of the very soil, foliage and organic material he was representing. Wet-on-wet textures, succulent accretions of pigment, translucent washes and richly built-up impastoes describe frosty fields, views through woody copses and agricultural scenes. 

We would be forgiven for initially reading Gainsford End Under Snow as a composition of purely abstract forms or an interplay of painterly textures. But more considered looking reveals triangular gables-ends, snow-covered rooftops, squared-off barn doors viewed across an open field. Fence posts, chimney stacks and tree boughs supply the necessary verticals to balance out the complex composition. It took Vaughan many years to fashion this simultaneously abstract-figurative style. The layered lozenges and abbreviated wedges of colour, combined with textured brushtracks, evoke a rural scene, glimpsed through russet-coloured thickets. We are, perhaps, reminded of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough.’ Without resorting to linear or aerial perspective, a sense of pictorial depth and the llusion of receding space is achieved. By ordering, tilting, flattening and layering coloured planes he has created air, space and distance between the pictorial forms.

Now this orderliness, which is common to all true works of art, is not something which can be imposed from outside, like a mould. It is more like the orderliness of a piece of machinery in which each part works together with every other. A painting is like that when the artist has translated his experience, his material, correctly into the language of visual forms, and made the image as true as possible to his own feelings and convictions: that is to say a true expression of what it’s like to be alive at this moment.[4]

[1] Keith Vaughan, undated and unpublished studio notes, c. 1959

[2] Keith Vaughan, A View of English Painting, ‘Penguin New Writing’, vol. 31, 1947.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Keith Vaughan, from Keith Vaughan: Painter, Granada Television, October 18, 1962.

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.

Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath
The Nicolas and Frances McDowall Collection
Osborne Samuel, London
Private Collection, U.K.

Only a handful of Vaughan’s oil paintings survive dating from the 1930s. Although he was in his twenties when he painted them, nonetheless they demonstrate qualities of confidence and self-assurance. Several, both full- and half-length, represent young men seated or standing (Seated Figure in an Armchair, c. 1937 and Portrait of Dick Vaughan, c. 1935) ,while others, as we see here, are simple portrait heads glowing against a sombre background. In each, the adolescent sitters are viewed in a three-quarter pose, turning to the right and conceived volumetrically with light and shade. The absence of background details or distracting settings compels that the viewer to focus attention on the features and facial expression of the model.

Although his identity remains uncertain, the sitter in Portrait Head is probably Dick Vaughan the artist’s younger brother. Vaughan received no formal training as a painter; he did not attend an art school and was largely self-taught. Having no access to professional models, his brother Dick was often cajoled into sitting for photographs and drawings. An oil on board portrait of him exists which dates from 1935, the same time Portrait Head was executed, and the two models bear more than passing resemblance to each other. At the start of the war Dick Vaughan accepted a short-term commission from the Royal Air Force and, in May 1940, was shot down over the river Meuse near Rheims. Two weeks later, Vaughan registered as a conscientious objector stating at his tribunal that he ‘objected to the wilful slaughter of my fellow men.’

A sensuous, youthful quality is given off by the rosy colours and fleshy application of the pigments which, in addition, lend a sense of vitality to the sitter. His facial expression, on the other hand, conveys a reflective, melancholic mood as though he quietly considers his place in the world or reflects on something inexpressible, unspoken and deeply felt. If this is, in fact, a portrait of the young Dick Vaughan, these qualities make the portrait even more poignant.

Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London

Christie’s, June 1991

Roberto Ceriani, U.S.A. (acquired from the above)

Redfern Gallery, London 

Private Collection, UK (purchased from the above) 

Osborne Samuel, London

In 1964 Vaughan bought a row of derelict cottages in the heart of the Essex countryside and set about renovating them. He created a small studio upstairs where he worked on small-scale oil paintings and gouaches at the weekends and during the summer months. Having nowhere to swim, he cleared a patch of land at end of the garden and excavated a waterhole. Railway sleepers interspersed with plants were dug into a shallow embankment to create a picturesque setting. The pool was more than a mere source of recreation. The theme of bathers had been a central subject in Vaughan’s work since the mid 1940s and now he began to paint friends reclining and drying themselves at the water’s edge in his garden. Two Bathers by a Pool depicts such a scene. Fellow artists were invited to visit Harrow Hill cottage at weekends. Patrick Procktor was a regular guest from 1966 onwards as was Mario Dubsky, one of Vaughan’s most talented pupils at the Slade. He recalled days spent making drawings of each other by the pool and Vaughan being at his most relaxed:

‘Keith and Patrick and I had some great fun. We held summer parties in the garden, swimming naked of course, and drank freezing drinks in between skinny dips in the pool. Mrs. Vaughan sometimes sat knitting in her deckchair, at the other end [of the garden], keeping a watchful eye on us. God knows what she thought of me and Patrick larking around after several gins. But we also had some serious discussions well into the night, about painting and literature. Keith would tell me what I should be reading. Patrick and Keith used to talk endlessly about the ways they could turn their personal experiences of life into art.’1

Procktor also brought with him the filmmaker Derek Jarman who, apparently, loved nothing better than to strip down and dive off the railway sleepers into the pool. The BAFTA-winning documentary maker Peter Adam visited along with his illustrious friends, including David Hockney, the grand master of the pool-painting genre. He recalled them all swimming and wallowing together in Vaughan’s garden pond – a far cry from the glamorous Californian pools he was used to:

‘David was living in Los Angeles but on his annual visit to his family in Bradford, (his mother still thought that it was the sun that bleached his hair!), he always took care to visit Keith. Once we drove in his new Morris Minor convertible to Essex. We splashed about in his little natural pool…All that amused Keith greatly.’2

Gerard Hastings

1. Mario dubsky, from gerard hastings, ‘paradise found and lost: keith vaughan inessex’, pagham press, 2016 

2. Peter adam, from ‘gerard hastings, keith vaughan: the photographs’,pagham press, 2013

The Artist’s Estate

Agnew’s 

Private Collection, UK

Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan Journals (1939-1976), ill. p.214

Agnew’s, British Art 1900-1998, September – October 1998, no.113

In the early 1960s, inspired by his students, in particular Mario Dubsky (1939–1985), Vaughan began to experiment with working in charcoal on a large scale. Dubsky studied at the Slade, and on leaving was awarded the Abbey Major Scholarship by a committee including Vaughan. From him Vaughan learnt how to blend charcoal, rubbing it into the paper, to create subtle grades of black that could be cut through or highlighted by an eraser.

The potential of the medium is demonstrated superbly by Two Men (1970), in which Vaughan contrasts the gentlest shading, used to define the centre of the left figure’s torso, and thus the twist of his body, with the velvety depth of shadow outlining his shoulder. Between the two figures are medium tones, and upon the draped cloth can be seen the smudged imprint of Vaughan’s own fingers. Against this, strong charcoal lines select and convey the outline of an ear, a navel, nostrils – only those details necessary to characterise the mood, the attitude, of the composition.

Linking the two men there is a homoerotic charge all the more powerful because of its ambiguity. The righthand figure’s intense gaze and proprietorial posture are countered by the left’s seeming casualness. Both are virile, unselfconsciously naked. It is a moment suspended: where it might lead – to passion, detachment or malevolence – is open to conjecture.