Modern British Art

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Private collection (purchased from the above in 1959)

T. Woollcombe (ed.), Kenneth Armitage: Life and Work, London, 1997, p. 144, no. KA70.
J. Scott, The Sculpture of Kenneth Armitage, London, 2016, p. 111, no. 71, plaster version illustrated.

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Kenneth Armitage, July – August 1959, no. 33, another cast exhibited, catalogue not traced.
Hanover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Kenneth Armitage/Lynn Chadwick, April – May 1960, no. 16, another cast exhibited, as ‘Two seated figures (small model)’, catalogue not traced.
Norwich, Arts Council of Great Britain, Castle Museum, Kenneth Armitage, December 1972 – January 1973, no. 9, another cast exhibited: this exhibition travelled to Bolton, Museum and Art Gallery, January – February 1973; Oldham, Art Gallery, February – March 1973; Kettering, Art Gallery, March – April 1973; Nottingham, Victoria Street Gallery, April – May 1973; Portsmouth, Museum and Art Gallery, May – June 1973; Plymouth, City Art Gallery, June – July 1973; Llanelli, Museum and Art Gallery, August – September 1973; Leeds, City Art Gallery, September 1973; and Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, October 1973.

From the edition of 6

Armitage moved from being represented by Gimpel fils to Marlborough Fine Art, London in the Autumn of 1959. This particular cast was bought from Marlborough that year and was unsigned and unnumbered. 

When, in December 1994, Armitage was elected a Royal Academician, he donated  ‘Reclining Figure (Relief)’ as a diploma work, and recorded that it had been shown in the Venice Biennale in 1958 and that ‘This cast which I have kept all these years is neither signed nor dated because I didn’t in those days.’

The Artist
Marlborough Fine Art, London
Private Collection (purchased from the above)

William Feaver, Frank Auerbach, published by Rizzoli, no. 428

Frank Auerbach ‘Recent Work’ 13 January – 11 February, 1983, Cat No 31, Marlborough Fine Art, London

Auerbach met Juliet Yardley Mills in 1956, when she was working as a model at Sidcup College of Art. He began to paint her the following year, and continued to do so, at his studio in Camden, every Wednesday and Sunday, until 1997. As with all his repeated sitters, Auerbach developed an acute awareness of posture and mood:

I notice something when people first come and sit and think, they do things with their faces. It’s when they’ve become tired and stoical the essential head becomes clearer. They become more themselves as they become tired. ₁

JYM was an ideal sitter, capable of holding poses for long periods of time. At first Auerbach painted her without identification in his titles, although she is distinguishable from his previous frequent subject, Stella West (EOW). A characteristic pose shows JYM seated, her head against the back of the chair or supported by linked hands. As Robert Hughes notes, she always returns the artist’s gaze, and ‘there is a look – head cocked back, sometimes seen a little from below, a bit quizzical, sometimes challenging – that makes [her portraits] quite recognizable as a series’. ₂

Auerbach’s drawings evolve and assume their final form across weeks of sittings. A day’s work may be scrubbed back, the following morning, to leave an accumulated deposit of charcoal. In some cases the paper wears perilously thin and needs to be patched. The finished drawing represents the last sitting, the most recent thoughts, yet Auerbach feels compelled to retain the accumulated traces as part of a process of securing the image within its own space and atmosphere. ₃

Head of JYM III gazes partially downwards. There is a weight and solidity that derives from the density of charcoal, implying the settled mass of the sitter, at ease, one shoulder higher than the other. The volume of her head is registered through its eye sockets, cheekbones and chin. Through these we gain an intuition of its totality, and how it might feel to follow the head round, past its visible limits.

₁ William Feaver, Frank Auerbach (Rizzoli, 2009), p. 20.

₂ Robert Hughes, Frank Auerbach (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), p. 80.

₃ Feaver, Frank Auerbach, p. 19.

Signed with initials, titled and dated verso

The artist

“Edging West” an exhibition of new paintings and ceramics at Osborne Samuel Gallery 28 November to 20 December 2019

Signed, titled and dated verso

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.

The Artist
Private Collector, Paris, circa 1957 (acquired directly from the above)
The Dina & Raphael Recanati Family Foundation
Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Farnham, 2014, p. 139, cat. no. 207 (ill.b&w)

Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Hitchens and Chadwick, March – May 1957, no. 48

Maquette for Winged Figures II (1956) demonstrates a key stage in the development of an idea of fundamental significance in Chadwick’s oeuvre. The trope of paired, winged figures originated a year earlier as an editioned bronze, and would reach its apogee in a large-scale work in fabricated and painted steel, exhibited in Spoleto, Italy, in summer 1962. A review for Studio magazine described how Chadwick’s steel ‘Two Winged Figures left us breathless, day and night … At night, they seemed more authoritative and mysterious – by casting the most terrifying, bat-like shadow on the house opposite. A shadow beyond human and artistic proportions.’[1]

Realised on an intimate scale, the unique Maquette for Winged Figures II possesses a quite different character. Its surfaces are characteristic of the material and construction method that Chadwick made his own: iron and composition, built upon an armature, which ages to a beautiful rust-red brown. This particular variation meshes material and form seamlessly. The two figures are timeless – wings outstretched and mouths open, they appear engaged in ritual dialogue.

Exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Maquette for Winged Figures II was owned by the Cairo-born sculptor and collector, Dina Hettena Recanati (1928–2021), who studied art history in London between 1946 and 1948 before moving to New York.

[1] Marianne Adelmann, ‘Sculpture in the Streets’, Studio, no. 164 (November 1962), p.164; quoted in Michael Bird, Lynn Chadwick (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2014), p. 118–19.

We are very grateful to Sarah Chadwick for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.

Galeria Freites, Caracas 

Private Collection, South America 

Creative Frames, Johannesburg, by the late 1990s, (acquired from the above)

Private Collector, UK

Farr & Chadwick, ‘Lynn Chadwick Sculptor,’ published by Lund Humphries, 2006, p. 275. no. C 62

Caracas, Galería Freites, Lynn Chadwick, May 1988, cat. no.26, illustrated (probably this cast).

The Artist
Private collection, USA (acquired directly from the artist, 1960)
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel, London

Dennis Farr and Eva Chadwick, Lynn Chadwick: Sculptor, With a Complete Illustrated Catalogue 1947-2003, Farnham, 2014, cat. no. 308, p. 179 (ill.b&w)

In 1959, Chadwick began his ‘watcher’ series of solitary, paired or groups of three figures. He described them as abstract versions of the monumental Easter Island stone moai: ‘They’re not, in any way, representative of anything. They’re just shapes. Blobs on the horizon. You see, the Easter Island things … have this great intensity of … message, as it were, and I wanted to do the same thing’.[1]

Two Watchers IV (1959) is a unique working model, distinctive among Chadwick’s ‘watcher’ series in two principal ways. First, its treatment of the figures pre-empts the cloaked forms of significantly later works: dividing surfaces into vertical geometric planes, truncated at a uniform level, suggests the fall of drapery. Secondly, the figures possess a curiously affecting relationship to one another. Where other ‘watchers’ look outwards towards an unseen object, Two Watchers IV stand shoulder-to-shoulder, their gaze grazing one another’s and thus encompassing each other. They are thus closely bonded while contemplating the unknown.

Unique. This was never cast in a bronze edition. 

[1] Lynn Chadwick, Artist’s Lives; quoted in Michael Bird, Lynn Chadwick (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2014), p. 11

Lynn Chadwick, Sculptor, Farr, Dennis and Eva Chadwick, Oxford University Press, 1997, no. 704s, illus. p. 301 (another example illustrated)

Christopher Hull Gallery
Private collection, UK 1992
Private Collection, UK

Ian Collins, John Craxton, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2011, p.49, illustrated pl.43

Dancer in a Landscape belongs to a series of images, painted or drawn by Craxton in the early 1940s, depicting solitary figures. He later described them as projections of himself, ‘derived from Blake and Palmer. They were my means of escape and a sort of self protection. A shepherd is a lone figure, and so is a poet.’ ₁

Poet in a Landscape and Dreamer in Landscape (now in the Tate collection) are dense pen and ink drawings, reproduced in Horizon in March 1942. In each, a seated figure appears oblivious of the encroaching vegetation, gnarled trunks and roots. Craxton’s lithographs for The Poet’s Eye (1944) likewise depict tin-helmeted figures, seated, lost in reverie amid moonlit landscapes, or half-concealed within trees.

By contrast, Dancer in a Landscape is lighter in mood. In the summer of 1943 Craxton travelled with Peter Watson and Graham Sutherland to St David’s Head in Pembrokeshire, where he sketched alongside Sutherland. As he recalled,

There were cloudless days and the land was reduced to basic elements of rocks, fig trees, gorse, the nearness of sea on all sides, a brilliant clear light. Everything was stripped away – all the verbiage, that is – to the essential sources of existence. ₂

This simplification is apparent in the clarity and lightness of Dancer in a Landscape. There is a joyous sense of movement in the depiction of the river, tussocks of grass, and soft shading of the figure, as well as the delicately feathered tree and spidery clouds. Throughout the composition, Craxton seems to delight in the possibilities of mark-making, lightening with chalk and adding touches of green and sepia

₁ John Craxton, in ‘John Craxton: Paintings and Drawings 1941–1966’, exhibition catalogue (Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1967), p. 6.
₂ Craxton, ibid.

Private collection, since 1950s
Osborne Samuel Gallery

Craxton travelled to Spetses from Poros with friend, Lucian Freud, in the Autumn of 1946 to celebrate his 24th birthday. There Craxton plotted an abstracted landscape from which several gouaches were produced.

Christopher Hull Gallery, London
Mr. and Mrs. Mark Holeman, Indiana, U.S.A. (acquired from the above in 1988)
Osborne Samuel, London

London, Christopher Hull Gallery, John Craxton Recent Work, October 4 – November 5, 1988

John Craxton’s dialogue with Greece stretches from paintings made in the late 1940s, in which the liberation from wartime England is palpable, to radiant compositions such as Sun, Cat and Bird (1986–88). Craxton was drawn equally to the landscape and its people – sailors, priests, shepherds and dancers, whom he portrayed in charcoal studies or in paintings on canvas or board. The hedonistic tenor of his early encounters is encapsulated in a postcard from 1948, where Craxton wrote, ‘I am off again in a day to an island where lemons grow & oranges melt in the mouth & goats snatch the last fig leaves off small trees the corn is yellow and russles [sic] & the sea is harplike on volcanic shores’.[1]

Sun, Cat and Bird splinters elements of this landscape into a mythical, sun-drenched scene. Sun electrifies the fur on the cat’s tail and haunches; the cat stalks its quarry through tangled rock and vegetation; the bird realises too late its fate. Craxton’s deep admiration for Byzantine mosaics is evident in the tessellation of the imagery and jewel-like colours that shimmer across the composition.

[1] Postcard to E.Q. Nicholson, quoted in Ian Collins, John Craxton (London: Lund Humphries, 2011), p. 99. 

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.

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.

Acquired directly from the artist by Leslie Waddington.
Private Collection, UK

Salzburg, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Barry Flanagan, June – July 1995 (another cast exhibited).

Conceived in 1995, this work is artist’s cast number one from an edition of eight plus four artist’s casts

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’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.

Brook Street Gallery, London
Roland Collection, London
Private Collection London
Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London
Sir Joseph Hotung, London
Osborne Samuel, London

Ionel Jianou, Henry Moore, Arted, Paris, 1968, no. 226, ill. p. 74 (another cast)
Giulio Carlo Argan, Henry Moore, New York, 1971, no. 77, ill. n.p. (another cast)
Giulio Carlo Argan, Le Grandi Monografie Scultori d’Oggi Moore, Fratelli Fabbri editori, Milan, 1971, no. 77, ill. p.37 (another cast)
David Sylvester (ed.), Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1948, Lund Humphries, London, 1988, Vol I, cat. no. 239, p. 15

London, Roland, Browse and Delbanco, Henry Moore, 1948 (another cast)
York, York City Art Gallery, The Roland Collection, 1950, no. 35 (another cast)
Leicester, Museum and Art Gallery, The Roland Collection, 1950, no. 35 (another cast)
Bristol, City Art Gallery, Festival of Britain Exhibition, 1951, no. 43 (another cast)
Southampton Art Gallery, The Roland Collection, 1952 (another cast)
London, Geffry Museum, Works by Henry Moore, 1954 (another cast)
Leeds, Leeds City Art Gallery, The Roland Collection, 1962, no. 74 (another cast)
London, Camden Arts Centre, The Roland Collection, 1976, no. 82 (another cast)
Edinburgh, National Gallery of Modern Art, One Man’s Choice, 1985, no. 64 (another cast)

From the edition of 7, plus 1. This bronze is recorded with the Henry Moore Foundation as LH 239, cast f.

A cast is held at the Smart Museum, Chicago USA. The terracotta original and a bronze cast is held by the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham, UK. The larger version of this bronze, the so-called Stevenage Family Group, are held by the Tate, London, MOMA, New York, Hakone Open-Air Museum, Japan, the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena & the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham. 

Before the war Moore was asked to create a work for a large progessive school in Impington. This lead to the idea of the Family Group and Moore made a series of Family Group maquettes, this cast being one of them. Moore discusses at length why this cast differs from the larger version which was eventually realised for the Barclay School in Stevenage:

The main differences between the two are in the heads, especially in the head of the man. In the small version (this bronze) the split head of the man gives a vitality and interest necessary to the composition, particularly as all three heads have only slight indications for features. When it comes to the life-size version, (the Family Group in Stevenage) the figures each becomes more obviously human and related to each other and the split head of the man became impossible for it was so unlike the woman and child. (There is a different connection between things which are three feet from each other, as the large heads are, and things which one sees in the same field of vision only two or three inches apart).

The Artist
Jeffrey Loria, New York
Private Collection, New York
Robert Landau, Canada
Private Collection, Canada
Osborne Samuel, London

David Sylvester (ed.) and Herbert Read, Henry Moore. Complete Sculpture, 1949-54, vol. II, London, 1986, no.335

The Henry Moore Foundation have recorded this cast in their archives as cast g.

Maquette for Draped Reclining Figure (1952) relates to a large-scale bronze commissioned for the roof terrace of the Time-Life building in Bond Street, London. This was the first of Moore’s sculptures to use ridged surfaces to suggest the folds of clothing. As he recalled in 1954, the approach derived from depicting drapery in his wartime shelter drawings, an experience that ‘gave me the intention, sometime or other, to use drapery in sculpture in a more realistic way than I had ever tried to use it in my carved sculpture.’[1]

Swathing the figure emphasises the points of tension within its form: where limbs bend, or where shoulders, breasts or thighs push outwards. Conversely, it indicates areas of slackness, such as between the knees where fabric hangs loosely. Much more than a decorative addition, drapery allowed Moore to connect his figures with the folds of landscape, specifically ‘mountains, which are the crinkled skin of earth.’[2] In the small-scale maquette, the tactile, roughened surfaces – rendered provisionally rather than acutely – lend the figure a powerful sense of mystery.

[1] Henry Moore, in Sculpture in the Open Air, exh.cat., Holland Park, London, 1954, reprinted in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2002), p. 28.

[2] Moore, ibid.

Another cast is held in The Bruce Museum, Connecticut, USA

The Goodman Gallery, South Africa 

Private Collection, London (acquired from the above in 1981) 

Thence by descent

Osborne Samuel, London

Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture: 1980-86, Vol. 6, London, 1988, no. 788, another cast illustrated, p. 36-37

Collegeville, Pennsylvania, Ursinus College, Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art, Henry Moore Relationships, Drawings, Prints & Sculpture from the Muriel and Philip Berman Collection, 1993-1994 (another cast).
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Henry Moore, A Centennial Salute, An Exhibition in Celebration of Philip I. Berman, July-November 1998, no. 18 (illustrated, p. 30) (another cast).

A cast from the edition is owned by the Henry Moore Foundation.

In John Hedgecoe’s seminal book on the artist, Moore states, “from the very beginning the reclining figure has been my main theme.’₁  This subject is central to Moore’s creativity throughout his career. In his own words, “the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially… A reclining figure can recline on any surface. It is free and stable at the same time. It fits in with my belief that sculpture should be permanent, should last for eternity.” ₂

Reclining Nude: Crossed Feet is an iconic sculpture. The initial impetus for the posture of the woman was inspired by the Chacmool figures which the artist first saw at the British Museum in the 1920s; the arms perpendicular to the ground, the knees raised and the twisting contours of the body. However in Moore’s Reclining Figures, the masculine rain god of the Chacmool has been, in William Packer’s words,  ‘transformed into an image more general, unhieratic and benign, as a simple function of the softer, rounded forms that came with the change of sex, and the humanising informality of the relaxed and turning body.’ ₃

The crossed feet and hands are abbreviations of the limbs, an extension of the contradictory, relaxed  torsion in the body. The contours of the sculpture evoke, as Moore noted, the disparate and enigmatic contours of the landscape, opening up voids beneath the shoulders and under the arms, echoed in the arching of the legs.  The sculpture can thus be seen in the round, each angle stimulates a new and perhaps surprising interpretation.

₁ John Hedgecoe, Henry Moore, published by Nelson, New York, 1968, p. 151

₂ Henry Moore cited in J.D. Morse, ‘Henry Moore Comes to America’, Magazine of Art, vol.40, no.3, March 1947, pp.97–101, reprinted in Philip James (ed.), Henry Moore on Sculpture, London 1966, p.264.

₃ Celebrating Moore, selected by David Mitchinson, published by Lund Humphries, 1998, p.125, extract written by William Packer

Galerie Patrick Cramer, Geneva (acquired from the artist, 1984)
Private Collection, purchased from the above in April 1984.
Private Collection, London
Osborne Samuel, London

Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture, 1980-1986, London, 1988, vol. 6, cat. no. 901, pp. 58-59 (ill b&w p.59 and pl. 126).

Private Collection, Chicago (acquired before 1950 & thence by descent)
Private Collection, USA

Ann Garrould (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Drawings, vol.3, 1940-49, Aldershot, 2001, no.AG43.107; HMF 2156, ills.p.196

Stanford, Iris & B Gerald Cantor Centre for Visual Arts, Stanford University, on loan, March 2000

This drawing is reminiscent of a work from the same period Reclining Figures: Ideas for Stone Sculpture, 1944, in which each figure appears in an individual pod in a subterranean setting, recalling the mysterious fascination that caves in hillsides and cliffs held for the artist. Moore’s interest in underground landscapes had previously been expressed in his ‘Shelter Drawings’ series of 1941, depicting figures taking refuge in the London Underground during the Blitz, and in his coal mining drawings of the same year.

The Artist
Curt Valentin, Buchholz Gallery, New York 
Mrs. Vera List, philanthropist and supporter of contemporary art, Greenwich, Connecticut (purchased from the above in 1951)
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel, London 

Henry Moore, Volume Two: Sculpture and Drawings Since 1948, (London: Lund Humphries, 1955)

Robert Melville, Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1969, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970) 

Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore: Complete Drawings, Volume 3, 1940-49; (London and Much Hadham: Lund Humphries, 2001, p.288, ref AG48.43; HMF 2515

New York, New York, Buchholz Gallery, Henry Moore, March 6-31, 1951, illustrated cat no. 66 (in this catalogue the drawing is incorrectly dated 1949)

This work is registered in the Henry Moore Foundation archives as HMF 2515 and research file number 2020.38. 

Rocking Chairs was purchased at Buchholz Gallery in 1951. The drawing was executed in 1948, four years before the bronze, Mother and Child on Ladderback Rocking Chair. In this drawing, Moore depicts five figure groups on rocking bases, with the
mother figure holding the child in various positions. Each group is three-dimensional, indicating that Moore conceived of the figure group as a sculpture from the beginning.

Moore’s series of sculptural rocking chairs was begun in 1950, when his daughter Mary, a much-loved and long-awaited child, was four years old. Although Moore had explored the theme of the mother and child since the 1920s, these new works showed a joy and tenderness born of experience. Will Grohman described them as ‘enchanting impromptus, the offspring of a lighter muse.’ 1 Their creation offers a glimpse both into Moore’s domestic life and the extent to which his personal and creative identity intertwined. Just as he experimented with how to balance the sculptures, so that they rocked perfectly, he would encourage Mary to think practically through play. For her eighth birthday party he produced a set of scales and invented a game to guess the weight of each guest. Moore’s estimates, perhaps unsurprisingly for a sculptor, proved accurate to within a few pounds. 2

Moore’s drawings provide a different insight. In the Rocking Chair Notebook (1947–8) he experimented with radically varied designs for the chair as well as the figures seated within them. The drawing, Rocking Chairs (1948), shows Moore adjusting the postures of mother and child so that each suggests an altered dynamic: from a protective embrace, to the joyous wriggling of the child held aloft, to an independent stepping forward, away from the mother’s arms. While mass is weighed through the technique Moore described as ‘sectional drawing’, dividing surfaces into jigsaw grids to highlight curves and planes, relatively little attention is paid to the chairs’ potential for movement: certain of the rockers seem implausibly flat. Instead, Moore lavishes his imagination on the figures. Grohmann noted how such variation developed across the span of the rocking chair series, although his words apply equally to this sheet of drawings: ‘heads became archaic knots, the bodies clothed skeletons, but the expression remains elated.’ 3

Rocking Chairs was bought in 1951 by the American philanthropist and collector, Vera List (1908–2002), from the Buchholz Gallery in New York. List, who a year later bought Moore’s Mother and Child on Ladderback Rocking Chair (1952), was an early and dedicated patron. In 1961 she and her husband sponsored the commission of Moore’s large-scale Reclining Figure (1963–5), in bronze, for New York’s Lincoln Center.

1.    Will Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, new enlarged edition (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1960), p. 142.

2.       Mary Moore, in Elizabeth Day, ‘The Moore Legacy’, The Observer (27 July 2008).

3.       Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, p. 143

Curt Valentin, New York
Alma Morgenthau Wertheim, New York
Anne Wertheim Werner, New York
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel, London

Ann Garrould, ed., Henry Moore Complete Drawings 1950-76, vol. III, Much Hadham, 2001, no. AG 47-49.63, p. 273, illustrated

The two seated figures in Women Winding Wool (c.1948) are engaged in an age-old task: rhythmically transferring yarn from hank to ball. We might imagine the women’s arms in motion – tilting, coiling and pulling the wool taut – as they engage in conversation or reflection. The process is as companionable and soothing as it is mundane.

Moore’s drawing, one of several of the subject made at this date,[1] gives a valuable insight into his working methods. The figures are drawn in pen and ink. Clustered lines indicate shadow or depth; their absence creates highlights. Through colour, a sense of an interior is conveyed, albeit without detail: this plain setting, with its square stools and bare floor, might be anywhere from a miner’s cottage in Yorkshire to ancient Greece. Between the figures is a network of pen marks suggesting a transfer of energy. The squared grid overlaying the image indicates that Moore was contemplating a further transformation of the image, whether through enlargement or translation to another medium.

[1] The Arts Council Collection contains a larger drawing of Women Winding Wool (1948), in watercolour, pencil and chalk, 54.2 x 56.3 cm, AC 24.

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.

The Artist
Marlborough Fine Art, London, April 1983
Private Collection, U.K. (acquired from the above)

Pittsburgh, The Carnegie International, March – June 1950

Around 1947, Piper rented Bodesi, a house facing the mountain of Tryfan in the Ogwen Valley of Snowdonia. This was not the first place where the family had stayed in Wales: in 1945 Piper rented a cottage named Pentre, in the Nant Ffrancon valley, which was prone to flooding and reached by a track that became impassable in poor weather. Bodesi was available only outside the summer months, accounting for Piper’s often stormy depictions of the landscape. As Piper recalled, ‘for the first time I saw the bones and structure and the lie of the mountains, living with them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock-world in fog’.[1]

Tryfan, the fifteenth-highest mountain in Wales, is easily recognised by its conical, jagged profile. In Piper’s painting, it dominates a landscape raked by low sun, revealing the texture and detail of rocks, scree and boulder fields.

[1] John Piper, in Richard Ingrams and John Piper, Piper’s Places (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986), p. 105.

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).

Rowan Gallery, London (#R1302)
Private Collection, New York (from the above in 1975)
Scolar Fine Art, London (before 2004)
Private Collection, UK (before 2004)
Osborne Samuel, London

Diamond Lil: Lilian Somerville, The Woman Behind the Post-War British Art Boom, by Judith LeGrove, Published by Osborne Samuel, 2022, p. 130 (includes text contributed by Bridget Riley)

The curve form was a fundamental part of Bridget Riley’s work since the early 1960s. They were incorporated into several of her most significant achievements during the first full decade of her career, when black emulsion predominated in her work: Current, 1964 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Arrest 2, 1965 (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri) and Exposure, 1966 (Linda and William Hermann Collection, Dallas) are three extremely fine examples. In all these paintings the curve is employed in different ways and with varying rhythms, or ‘change of pace’ as Riley herself described. When considering Rising and Falling Curve with Turquoise, Cerise, Olive and Black (1974) with its long, slow curves it is with Arrest 2 that the closest affinity can be found. Taking the colour element aside, the paintings which are vertical in structure integrate softly undulating curves which never meet, thus creating space between them which allows the compositions to breathe. The units themselves change in width as the eye is drawn both upwards and downwards (Rising and Falling) through the image, to create a destabilising, asymmetrical effect, enhancing their expressive character.

In conversation with Paul Moorhouse, when asked, ‘What is distinctive about the curve as a formal element?’ Bridget Riley explained, ‘Well, in my case the curve is very much a “made” thing. You could say that a square has a great many cultural references. A square is a man-made shape – a very basic one – and as a result very familiar. It must go back to the time when man began to make something, plan something or construct something, but the curve is not defined…It gives me exceptional freedom. Its range is wider and bigger; it can still be a curve when it is doing really quite surprising things’. 1

Whilst tonal gradations were introduced by Riley to her Arrest 2 painting, softening the stark contrasting elements of her pure black and white works, it was not until 1967, with Cataract 2, that the use of colour became a staple in her fields of curves. Speaking further with Paul Moorhouse, Riley noted, ‘I knew that colour was one of my goals. But it is very complex, very difficult and, pictorially, a great challenge. This was clearly realised from the early days of Modern Art. Colour has always posed a great challenge, but I also knew that you had to stalk this particular quarry with great care.’ 2

This ‘great care’ is much in evidence with Rising and Falling Curve with Turquoise, Cerise, Olive and Black where Riley juxtaposes a perfect harmony of warm colours, typical of her palette choice during the mid-1970s. The pink, blue and green are punctuated at intervals by four twisting lines of black which serve to accentuate the depth of the image. It is these elements especially which Riley linked to movement in a standing human figure, and in particular their sensuality. Yet in parallel with this, the feelings and emotions evoked by certain colours being conjoined was of paramount importance to the artist, and with Rising and Falling Curve with Turquoise, Cerise, Olive and Black these are very much ones of joy and warmth.

Ultimately, Riley found the curve both a successful and fulfilling motif. It would play a pivotal role in her work from 1974-80, after which vertical stripes came to the fore. Curves then re-surfaced in the late 1990s, and asked whether she was surprised to see them back, her succinct reply speaks volumes, ‘Well, not really. I was very happy because I had missed them for so long! And also, especially as I got going, a whole range of possibilities opened itself to me. The interaction of colours and curves seemed boundless.’ 3.

1.Bridget Riley in conversation with Paul Moorhouse, cited in Bridget Riley, The Curve Paintings 1961-2014, Ridinghouse in association with De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, 2015, (pp.43&47)

2. op.cit. p.47

3. op.cit. p.51

Desmond Coke
Sotheby’s London, 23 July 1931
Christie’s London, 12 November 1987
Geoffrey Beene
His sale; Christie’s New York, 24 May 1994
Private Collection, U.K.
Osborne Samuel, London

Andrew Gibbon-Williams & Ruth Artmonsky, William Roberts & Jacob Kramer, The Tortoise and the Hare, Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art, London, 2003, ill.p.10

Leeds, University Gallery, William Roberts and Jacob Kramer: The Tortoise and the Hare, 30 April – 20 June 2003; toured to London, Ben Uri Art Gallery, 7 July – 7 September 2003, ill.p.10

The original owner of Bathers, Desmond Coke (1897-1931), was a British writer commissioned into the 10^th (Service) Battalion of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment in October 1914. At the Western Front, as Adjutant of the Regiment, he was responsible for writing up the Battalion diary. Eventually invalided out of the army after contracting trench fever in May 1916, he went on to write adventure stories for boys under the pseudonym Belinda Blinders. He also collaborated with the artist John Nash, who illustrated his 1921 book, The Nouveau Poor. Coke may well have been friends with William Roberts and will certainly have been aware of the latter’s significant World War I commissions received from the Canadian Memorials Fund and the British Ministry of Information. 

Drawn in 1923, it has been suggested (by the William Roberts Society) that Bathers was probably exhibited in Roberts’ first one-man exhibition, Paintings and Drawings by William Roberts at the Chenil Gallery, London in November 1923. An untraced work from this show, titled Sea Frolic, would seem to match Bathers, and further drawings in the exhibition are known to be inscribed with titles which are not consistent with the exhibition catalogue. 

Following Coke’s death in 1931, Bathers was offered for sale at Sotheby’s where it disappeared into an unknown collection, until it re-appeared again at auction, in the 1980s. The drawing then entered the collection of Geoffrey Beene (1924-2004), one of New York’s most famous fashion designers in the 1960s and 1970s, who was recognised for his artistic and technical skills. Latterly, it was in the collection of Ruth Artmonsky, gallerist and curator of William Roberts & Jacob Kramer, the Tortoise and the Hare, staged at Ben Uri Gallery, London, and the University Gallery, Leeds, in 2003, in which Bathers featured (cat.no.16).

Commenting on the artist’s Chenil Gallery exhibition in 1923, Gibbon Williams states, ‘Roberts’ first solo exhibition was a heavyweight spectacle. It comprised nearly sixty works – paintings, drawings and prints…Muirhead Bone’s catalogue introduction was especially perspicacious. It pinpointed the very qualities that marked Roberts out from the generality of his contemporaries: his “boldness”, “mordant irony” and “sense of design”. “A strong love of character at it raciest” Bone wrote, “especially where it shades into the grotesque – he presents to us his memories of life in a sharp manner, odd, vivid, and quite his own, whose foundation is a really sterling draughtsmanship.”’1

Whilst Bathers has been lightly squared for transfer, it is possible Roberts abandoned the oil painting. An oil on canvas, titled The Bathers and dated to circa 1925 bears little resemblance to this drawing, in which all of the figures are standing, and appear to be engaged in a loose and joyous procession or dance around the central figure, not dissimilar in compositional design to the right-hand side of The Dance Club (The Jazz Party) painted in the same year and now with Leeds Museums and Galleries, City Art Gallery, Leeds. Whilst it is tempting to draw parallels with Cézanne and his bathers, Roberts doesn’t depict the group of nude figures as a formal exercise as Cézanne would have, but as was often the case with Roberts there seems to be an underlying narrative idea, although intriguingly one that is not explained. That the figures in the drawing are unclothed seem to give Bathers a Dionysian element. However, considering the tailpiece drawings that Roberts produced for Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 1925–26 several of them such as A Reluctant Shepherd and Male and Female feature unclothed figures where the nudity seems to be driven purely by design elements rather than any relevance to the narrative. The bodies, arms and legs of the eight figures depicted in Bathers are entwined in a complex arrangement of angles and curves, with a heavy use of pencil and subtle shading, which recalls the artist’s own earlier forays in Cubist experimentation, as seen in his studies on paper for the now lost Two Step (1915).

Referring to Roberts’ work dating from the early 1920s, Gibbon Williams remarks, ‘While fidelity to the visual truth of a specific event is rarely sacrificed to formal requirements, his drawings and paintings of this period are an example of Cubism being manipulated with realistic intent.’2 It is this quasi-Cubist aesthetic which Roberts embraced during the early 1920s which makes Bathers, and other drawings from his significant 1923 Chenil Gallery show so appealing. 

1.    Andrew Gibbon William, William Roberts, an English Cubist, Lund Humphries, 2004, p.68
2.       op. cit. p.60

Private collection, South Africa
Thence by descent
Osborne Samuel, London

Bedridden for several years during childhood, the Norwich-born artist Edward Seago began to paint scenes from his bedroom window. He later rebelled against this restrictive experience by joining a circus, travelling and sailing, including a voyage to Antarctica in 1956–7, all of which provided inspiration for his paintings. Seago served in the Royal Engineers in World War II, and after being invalided out in 1944 was invited to document the Italian Campaign. In 1953 he was appointed as official artist of the Coronation.

Stylistically, Seago drew sustenance from the English landscape tradition: from the Norwich School of Artists, Alfred Munnings, and above all John Constable. Thames from Lambeth Bridge (c.1973) is characteristic of his mature style in its impressionistic approach, deftly conveying the play of light on water, the breadth of the river and London’s architecture, veiled by distance and the city’s haze.

Estate of the artist and thence by descent

William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings , 2013, edited by Sarah Whitfield: No.394 Volume 2

This painting is unsigned, it was William Scott’s practice to only sign works when they were sold.

The Artist

Lefevre Gallery, London, January 1947

Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Los Angeles, U.S.A.

Private Collection, U.K. (purchased from the above, May 1980) 

Alan Peat & Brian A. Whitton, John Tunnard: His Life and Work, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1997, p. 178, cat. no. 522

Serving as an auxiliary coastguard in Cornwall, during World War II, John Tunnard spent hours watching shipping at sea. His paintings are suffused with forms derived from or invented as a result of this experience: seascapes alive with objects resembling masts, rotors and weathervanes. In Aerial Disturbance (1946), Tunnard creates washes of colour to suggest sand, sea and sky, overlaid with spikes meshed with fronds of weed. Between the foreground and middle distance, strange white forms – hybrids of sea purses, sails or birds – fly from shore to sky.

The Artist

Lefevre Gallery, December 1946

Dalzell Hatfield Galleries, Los Angeles, U.S.A.

Private Collection, U.K. (purchased from the above, May 1980)

Alan Peat and Brian A. Whitton, John Tunnard: His Life and Work, Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1997, p. 177, cat. no. 516

Having studied textile design at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s, Tunnard gained a reputation as one of the most distinctive British artists of the 1930s. His first major exhibition was held in March 1939 at Guggenheim Jeune, on Cork Street in London’s Mayfair. For the gallery’s owner, Peggy Guggenheim, Tunnard’s paintings were as ‘musical as Kandinsky’s, as delicate as Klee’s, and as gay as Miró’s.’[1] The artist Julian Trevelyan elaborated, conjuring Tunnard as a painter of surrealist bricolage, a ‘hot jazz king’ who transforms what he finds into ‘musical instruments … tightly strung with delicate wires in red and blue’.[2]

Tunnard’s painting, Threat (1946), melds pre-war surrealism with the wartime experience of serving as an auxiliary coastguard in Cornwall. Skeletal forms rear from the right of the composition towards funnels, around and across which wraps a ribbon resembling fish skin. The sky and palette are darkened; the nature of the ‘threat’ ominously ambiguous. Yet despite this, the composition retains a balletic grace, recalling Tunnard’s interest in music and skill as a jazz drummer.

[1] Peggy Guggenheim, Confessions of an Art Addict (London: Andre Deutsch, 1960), p. 19

[2] Julian Trevelyan, Introduction to the John Tunnard exhibition at Guggenheim Jeune, London Bulletin, issue 12 (15 March 1939).

Waddington Galleries Ltd, London
Private Collection USA, purchased from the above in 1989
Osborne Samuel, London
Private Collection, Canada (purchased from the above in 2014)

Davidson, Amanda, The Sculpture of William Turnbull , published by Lund Humphries, 2005, p.175, no. 263

Waddington Galleries, Solo exhibition, 1991, cat 9 (illus. p.23)

The idols Turnbull made in the 1980s revisit forms from the 1950s, demonstrating an essential seam within his sculptural thinking. Female Figure (1980) presents a vertical slab, scrolled at the top to suggest a head, gently scored towards the base to imply a robe. Arms become curved pipes, a counter-positioned wedge suggests feet, but the most salient feature is the figure’s breasts, implausibly and voluptuously placed.

The figure clearly suggests fertility: a goddess or idol, resonating with both ancient and more recent history. In rituals – whether pagan or religious – the chalice or jug is often equated with birth, as a parallel to the pregnant figure. One of the most significant transferences within modern sculpture is Germaine Richier’s L’Eau (1953), or Water, in which she incorporated the fragment of a terracotta amphora, found on a beach at Camargue, as the neck of a seated figure. The hooped handles of the vessel, just as the arms of Turnbull’s Female Figure, evoke a symbolic link to water, a source for life.

Slim in profile, despite its towering height and material heft, Female Figure evinces both grace and a sense of joyousness, expressed by its arms – curved, hand on hip, or open to embrace. There is a recapturing, too, of the spirit of Acrobat (1951), made at the beginning of Turnbull’s career, who balances exuberantly and fearlessly, arms outstretched.

The Artist

Waddington Galleries, London, May 11, 1987

Private Collection, USA

Thence by descent

Amanda A Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, published by the Henry Moore Foundation, 2005, no.267, p. 176

London, Serpentine Gallery, William Turnbull, 1995 (another cast);

London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, 1998, cat no.1, p.16, illustrated p.17 (another cast);

London, Waddington Galleries, William Turnbull, 2004 illustrated p.32 (another cast);

London, Sotheby’s S|2, William Turnbull, 9 October – 17 November 2017, p.140, illustrated p.17 (another cast).

‘The idea of metamorphosis in Turnbull’s work is at its most intense in the Blade Venus series. These large sculptures suggest the shapes of Chinese knives, Japanese Samurai swords, pens, paintbrushes, leaves and goddess figures in one elegant, slightly curved form. Their form and inspiration relate them to the Zen paintings that inspired Turnbull and to the calligraphic paintings, drawings and reliefs that he produced in the 1950s. Like a single gesture, with a wide and a thin section, they combine all of the breadth of the front view with the slenderness of the side view in one perception. Part of their ambiguity and their dynamic presence stems from the spectators’ simultaneous ability to see both the wide element and the narrow section as the handle or the blade or tip of the tool. Although they are absolutely still they are also balanced on their sharpest point, poised to act.’

(Amanda A. Davidson, The Sculpture of William Turnbull, Henry Moore Foundation & Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2005, pp.72-73).

Bonham’s: November 8. 2007
The Lefevre Gallery

Private Collection, U.K.

Over the summer of 1942 No. 9 Company was given the task of clearing the grounds of Ashton Gifford House to which the Greenways Preparatory School children had been evacuated from Bognor Regis. Occasionally local children and school pupils joined in the task. The house was a three-story, Neo-Classical building whose extensive grounds were overrun with vegetation. The romantic setting inspired several paintings from Vaughan over the course of the next few years, including The Working Party, 1942, Tree Felling at Ashton Gifford, 1942/3 and The Garden at Ashton Gifford, 1944. Clearing the woodland not only offered the soldiers worthwhile community service but also provided fuel for the barrack room stoves. Dozens of trees were felled using little more than chopping axes and then cut up into regulation-sized logs with handsaws. It was blistering employment especially so in the hot summer months.

Vaughan made dozens of sketches of his company’s activities in his sketchbook, usually in pen and ink and sometimes in pencil. He seems to have been particularly thorough in his preparations for The Working Party which is among his most ambitious wartime images. He filled several sketchbooks with rapidly executed studies, some drawn at great speed to capture the dynamism of the figures splitting and hauling branches. Further drawings depict the men chopping and sawing, dragging enormous boughs and logs, loading lorries and, occasionally, taking well-earned breaks. Despite the exhaustion, Vaughan found aesthetic values in his surroundings, enough to write about it to his friend, the painter Norman Towne:

…white and ochre branches plunging down into the oceanic surging of tangled nettles. People walking through the waist-high grass, through the aqueous leaf-green shadow, arms full of dead wood…and the wall running as an indefatigable horizontal, losing and finding itself in the jungle of weed and ivy…I wanted to capture this in lassoes of line and nets of colour, but it’s more difficult than writing about it. (Letter to Norman Towne, October 12, 1942)

The felled trees dwarf the men whose formidable task is carried out beneath a dark canopy of dense foliage described in translucent sepia ink washes. The walls are overgrown, here and there with ivy, in true Neo-Romantic style. On the walls and foreground passages Vaughan has used an orange tint. This has the effect of warming up what is a monochromatic, and somewhat menacing scene. The high wall surrounding the estate supplies the necessary geometrical stability from which to hang this composition. The lines describing the figures, with their rolled-up sleeves, overlay the tree boughs, indicating that they were added at a later stage.

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.

Waddington Galleries, London

Professor J. N. Ball

Private Collection, U.K.

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p.178, no. AH519

London, Waddington Galleries, Keith Vaughan: New Paintings, 1973

Glasgow, Compass Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Gouaches, 1976 (no. 5)

London, Austin/Desmond, A Selection of Work, 1987

Vaughan painted the Essex landscape over the course of two decades. Mortimer’s Farm is situated a few miles southwest of Harrow Hill cottage. As the title suggests, Copse by Mortimer’s II was his second attempt at depicting agricultural buildings viewed through the small woodland area between his house and the local farm. The first version caused such problems that he painted over it five years later.

The late Essex paintings are generally small and intimate in conception. They contain little human activity, nor do they depict picturesque subjects customarily found in landscape paintings. The area around Harrow Hill is lacking in scenic hills, rivers or other traditionally picturesque features. The rolling, hedge-less farmland is interrupted only by agricultural buildings, wooded coppices, and some notable medieval barns. It was precisely this unspectacular quality that attracted him:

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 the ones outside the window of my studio. Trees & sky & some man-made objects such as a house – that is enough to start the reaction. A landscape can only be measured by its remoteness from, & similarity to, human beings. But they must be as remote as the landscape is remote, however familiar & visible. 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 & hour (Keith Vaughan, unpublished and undated studio notes, c. 1959).

The application of the pigment is rich and varied, in places flat and opaque and in others, more translucent. Gestural brush strokes act as an equivalent of dried tree bark or the texture of desiccated, autumnal foliage. They create the quality of flux across the surface of the panel. Some forms appear to advance towards the viewer, while others recede into the distance. For example, the creamy ochres act as a foreground space and the colder, ultramarine blues retreat into the distance. To achieve a sense of space Vaughan has flattened the landscape elements into overlapping planes and blocks of organic shapes. Gradually we become aware of bending boughs, brushwood, distant vegetation and patches of blue sky, glimpsed through the thicket and undergrowth. Vaughan has not attempted to reproduce how the eye perceives the scene but paints the experience of moving though the woodland towards Mortimer’s farm.

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

Matthiesen Gallery, London, 1962

Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1962

Waddington Galleries, London

Hargreaves and Ball Trust

Austin/Desmond, Sunninghill

Roger Thomas

Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath

Private Collection, U.K.

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p.163, no. AH463

London, Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1962, cat. no. 305

Canada, Arts Council, Exhibition of Contemporary British Paintings, 1963-64, cat. no. 52 (touring exhibition)

Aldeburgh Festival, 1973, no. 13

Manchester, Tib Lane Gallery, Keith Vaughan, Paintings, Gouaches and Drawings, 1976 (cat. no. 22)

Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, 2007, p. 34, cat. no. 32 (ill.)

Group of Figures (Blue) was started in 1962 and exhibited several times once completed. However, Vaughan reworked the painting, as was his habit, a few years later, altering its surface textures and tonality but retaining most of the original compositional features.

Two pale figures stand shoulder to shoulder, arms behind their backs and tilting their heads tenderly towards one another. They are bathed in opalescent light against an atmospheric, twilight background. Patches of cream and bright yellow on their torsos glow and sing against the other restrained colours. Soft blue shadows play on the shoulders and chest of the left figure, establishing both a tonal and a character contrast between him and his paler companion. 

Vaughan’s application is sumptuous, and his pigment is built up in alternating rich layers and diluted washes. The highly worked and hard-won surface, acting as a tactile equivalent of skin, is one of his most sensuous.

Acquired directly from the artist

Marlborough Gallery

Private Collection, France

Osborne Samuel, London

Massey & Hepworth, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, p.123, cat no. AH326

London, Whitechapel Gallery, Retrospective Keith Vaughan, March – April 1962, no.265
London, Olympia, February – March 2002, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings,  n° KV 282
Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, February –  March 2007, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Landscape, no.30, ill. p.32

From the later 1950s, Vaughan painted landscapes without figures that verged towards complete abstraction: works in which colour is tessellated into compositions structured by more or less geometrical units. The impetus was light and colour, whether experienced abroad, in France, Greece, Italy and Iowa (where he held a residency), or nearer to home, in London, Dorset, Essex, Northumbria, Wales and Ireland. Landscape would be internalised and re-presented, sometimes leaving vestiges of buildings, trees, snow or hills, sometimes just the trace of these elements through their seasonal timbre. Vaughan described the process and its consequences in his working notes:

Particles of landscape which detach themselves float out into space – continuing a foreground plane against a distant one. Floating particles of landscape create a vivid sense of space … Small floating squares and rectangles. They might equally be leaves or scraps of paper. This is unimportant. Their identity will be determined by their circumstances. ₁

This return to ‘pure landscape’ was noted and commended by Edwin Mullins, reviewing Vaughan’s  large-scale retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1962. ‘Among the best of the recent work’, wrote Mullins, ‘were those in the spirit of the early landscapes; paintings inspired by travel and places, full of atmosphere and effects of light, and painted in the warm, sombre colours of the earth.’² Landscape (1960) was one such work. A source in landscape is hard to detect, yet the composition splinters light and autumnal warmth into a patchwork of lines and blocks, counterpointed by a continuum of hazy blue-greys.

₁ Keith Vaughan, ‘Notes of the Process of Painting and Diary of Work in Progress’; quoted in Keith Vaughan: Myth, Mortality and the Male Figure, exhibition catalogue (London: Osborne Samuel, 2019), p. 36

² Edwin Mullins, ‘Vaughan Reconsidered’, Apollo, Vol. 26, No. 3 (May 1962), p. 219.

R N Kershaw, Wargrave
Leicester Galleries, London
Private Collection
Prof. John Ball
Private Collection
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel Gallery

John Rothenstein, British Art since 1900, Phaidon, London, 1962 (pl.150)
Philip Vann & Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan, Lund Humphries in association with Osborne Samuel, 2012 p.16 no. 9 (ill.)
Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012 p.107 no. AH260 (ill.)
Gerard Hastings, Visions and Recollections , Pagham Press, 2014, (ill.), Cat. No. 101.

Leicester Galleries, London, 1958, Keith Vaughan – Recent Paintings (no.23)
Menier Gallery, London, Clough & Vaughan: Visions and Recollections, 2014

Nude Against a Rock is one of Vaughan’s more resolved depictions of the male form. Possessing a thorough knowledge of Ancient Greek art, it is Vaughan’s homage to the statuary of the Classical period, which developed the harmonious proportions he so admired in sculpture. He has positioned the figure in a contrapposto pose whereby the weight is supported mainly on one leg, while the other is more relaxed. In the upper torso the opposite arm is in tension, holding his staff behind, while the corresponding arm hangs free. This has the effect of tilting both the hips and the shoulders and gently enlivens, what would otherwise be, a static figure. Placing him slightly to the left and twisting his head to the right, augments this delicate animation and generates a sense of tranquillity and repose. 

In the distance, an ominous sky and dark trees frame the figure and, in the foreground, an imposing rock presses upon him. Vaughan offers us no information as to who this vulnerable youth is or why he stands here in this barren, rocky terrain. The intentional omission of facial features precludes identification or character analysis. Similarly, the absence of clothing prevents us making judgements about his social status or identity. By approaching the human form in this way Vaughan discourages us from imposing narrative associations and, consequently, the figure is universalised. While he may not be identifiable, we do know who the model was. Vaughan had met Johnny Walsh in the Black Horse pub in Soho the year before. He recorded their meeting in his journal.

January 8, 1956: Unforeseen encounter on New Year’s Eve with Johnny Walsh. L’Archange of Jean Genet. Captivating face of a young boxer. I invited him to come & let me draw him sometime. He finally arrived one afternoon last week. His clothes, all of which he at once took off, assuming that to be my wish, were either stolen or given to him. He gave me full details of his life. Brought up apparently in a perfectly respectable working-class family. Became involved with a car-stealing gang, ran a small-scale brothel (‘only 10/- a time’) & was finally caught & sentenced for petty larceny. Is now just released & has ‘no fixed address’ as the police would say. Lives by pickpocketing. All this he told me sitting naked beside the stove in my studio.

One of the most notable qualities of Nude Against a Rock is Vaughan’s treatment of the anatomy. It is broken down into small facets and angled planes of colour applied, for the most part, with a flat-ended brush. An array of blocked-in but related, fleshy tints of ochre, yellow and orange describe the articulation of the athletic figure. The more neutralised hues of the setting serves to frame this flame-like human presence.

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 Hon. Hugh Davies

Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath

Private Collection, U.K.

Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan, His Life and Work, Constable & Co., London, 1990, pl. 47 (col.)

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-77, Sansom & Co., Bristol, 2012, p.177, no. AH514

Bath, Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Keith Vaughan: Paintings, 1995

London, Olympia, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings, 2002, no.390

Vaughan visited San Giorgio on the Greek island of Corfu on several occasions accompanied by his friend Patrick Woodcock and the theatre designer Gladys Calthrop. His final visit was in August 1969 just before he started work on this painting. His journal says he bathed several times at San Giorgio before heading to Paxos to visit the actor Peter Bull who had a house there. It was a rare moment of unfettered joy for him.

Only 24 hours since I arrived. How differently I feel. Tensions, anxieties, depression completely vanished. In the sea this morning at San Giorgio, lifted & buffeted by the heavy fuming sea, it occurred to me that for the first time in years I felt simply happy to be alive. I must remember this. It is so good to feel happy again without anything changing inside, simply a different environment – just a manic mood? Perhaps. (Journals, Aug 29, 1969)

While bathing, he met up with a dark-haired boy named Nikos and a blond boy called Jerry, who showed him the best beaches away from tourists. They made friends and accompanied him throughout the holiday, lunching and dining together. Undoubtedly the two figures in the painting are representations of them. They stand on the sand, coloured towels in hand, before a pile of rocks and a troubled sky.

Leicester Galleries, London, 1955

E.P. Ortweiler

Christie’s, 30 May 1997, lot 49

Private Collection, U.K.

London, Leicester Galleries, Keith Vaughan, February 1955, cat. no. 53

London, Olympia, Keith Vaughan, 26 February – 3 March 2002 

R.L. Banks
George Milman
Robert Wraight
Sir Richard Attenborough
Private collection, UK

THESEUS AND THE MINOTAURE (INTERIOR AT MINOS or THESEUS), 1950, (P247)
Geffrye Museum, London, ‘Keith Vaughan: Images of Man’ catalogue, illustrated p. 29
Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946 -77, Sansom & Co Bristol, 2012, no. AH99

Lefevre Gallery, London. ‘Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Gouaches’, 1950 (titled Theseus)
Hatton Gallery, University of Durham, Newcastle, ‘Keith Vaughan: Retrospective’, 1965 (no. 7; title Theseus1950)
Whitechapel Gallery, London ‘Keith Vaughan: Retrospective’, 1962 (no. 122; title Theseus 1951; ill. in catalogue pl.xxiii)
Tate Britain, London. On three year loan from 2010-13

In an attempt to encourage British painters to produce large-scale works for the Festival of Britain, the Arts Council offered them free materials and enormous canvases. The idea was to promote ambitious, heroic painting after the wartime period of shortages and rationing. Vaughan submitted Theseus and the Minotaure , the largest picture he ever painted, aside from his publically commissioned murals. He described the painting in the following terms: 

The first thing to say about the painting was that it was wrongly titled owing to my lack of classicalscholarship. I was under the impression that Minos was an island instead of the name of the king. Thepainting should be called ‘ Theseus’ or ‘ Theseus and the Minotaure’ . It was suggested by André Gide’ s novelThésée in which the minotaure is depicted not as the horned monster of classical anthropology but as a misunderstood youth who spends his time in the labyrinth eating pomegranates and picking petals off flowers.

(Keith Vaughan, letter, quoted in Hepworth, Keith Vaughan the Mature Oils , Sansom & Co., 2012)

The Classical Myth:

In the Homeric myth, King Minos was the powerful ruler of ancient Crete. To sanction his authority and confirm his legitimacy to rule he prayed to Poseidon to send him a sign. This came in the form of a white bull rising from the waves. Minos did not sacrifice it to Poseidon, as instructed, but substituted another and kept the prized animal. As punishment Poseidon cursed him by having his wife Queen Pasiphae fall in love with the bull. She became pregnant and gave birth to a halfman, half-bull creature – the Minotaur. Minos ordered his architect Daedalus to construct a series of labyrinthine corridors beneath his palace at Knossos in which to imprison the monster.

Minos went on to defeat the Athenians after a drawn-out military dispute. As tribute King Aegeus was forced, every nine years, to deliver up seven young men and seven young women to be sacrificed to the Minotaur. On the third occasion his son Theseus volunteered as one of the victims, undertaking to slay the Minotaur. When he arrived in Crete he met Ariadne, daughter of Minos and they fell in love. She gave him a ball of twine to unravel as he set off into the labyrinth. After a fearsome battle Theseus slayed the Minotaur and, aided by the twine, was able to navigate his way back to Ariadne. They escaped Crete together, sailing to the island of Naxos where Theseus later abandoned her.

André Gide’ s Narrative:

While preparing Theseus and the Minotaure Vaughan turned to French literature for inspiration rather than illustrate the much-visited ancient legend. André Gide, one of his favourite writers, published his final novel Thésée in 1946, having worked on it for over two decades. Vaughan read this reimagined version in French and based his painting on Gide’ s post-Freudian interpretation.

For him the Minotaur represented a fatal, self-absorbing beauty whose destructive allure was completely irresistible. He transposed the Minotaur, usually conceived as violent and murderous, to symbolise the principle of self-destruction – the monster within us all. Theseus has to engage in a battle with himself, therefore, before escaping the labyrinth. His conflict is not so much with the Minotaur, but a struggle for his soul against his inner self-monster and the forces of luxurious indulgence. The labyrinth, in Gide’ s conception, is an internal prison of one’ s own devising, the walls and corridors of which are buried deep within the self. These are filled with such pungent narcotics, one never feels the urge to escape.

Vaughan’ s Interpretation:

Two years after the publication of Thésée Vaughan visited Paris and had a brief affair with a young man called Karlo. His journal states that on his return Vaughan felt trapped inside his own internal labyrinth, caught between self-indulgence and futile attempts to work:

August 14, 1948:

Treasure the memory of Karlo – his debonair grace – his laughter, his frank lust, his beauty, his fantasticsordid, tiny room in the roof – stairs – naked lamps – labyrinth of corridors – pitch black – holding hishand like Ariadne stumbling after Theseus. Very much a slave now to vice, to sexual lusts, increasing complication of solitary gratification. Paralysis of will, imagination, action. Sit for hours in my studioblocked by noise of traffic, crescendo, decrescendo – like soft repeating whip lashes over my raw brain.

Hands bleed from clawing the smooth hard surface for a hold. I become aware of this growing sense of doom which has been going on for a year or more. Almost as though I were under the sentence of death.

Theseus:

Theseus appears in the heart of the labyrinth, having negotiated its passageways. He is emerging into a light-filled room silhouetted against the blackness of the doorway. He stands, head bowed and arms open, as though offering himself as a sacrificial victim. At first his pose and attitude might seem puzzlingly submissive, since his traditional motive for having arrived here is to slay the Minotaur. But in Gide’ s conception he is also here to slay the self-monster. Vaughan describes him in a grey-buff colour, slightly darker than the other figures, reminding us of Gide’ s words: 

‘The colour of truth is grey.’ He is psychologically removed from the other two figures and mentally prepares himself for his ordeal.

Ariadne:

Ariadne, emotionally detached from both Thesues and the Minotaur, does not turn towards her lover as he arrives. She stares abstractedly at something undisclosed outside the realm of the painting. This might be explained in the following way. In both the classical myth and in Gide’ s interpretation Ariadne should be in the palace of Minos, awaiting Theseus. Vaughan employs continuous narrative and expects the viewer to accept that he is simultaneously representing her and the others within the same physical space. This was a common pictorial convention of the Quattrocento narrative painters that Vaughan so admired. She is naked, vulnerable and crosslegged. Her self-embracing pose, twitching toes and neurotic stare communicate her anxiety. Perhaps she has prescience, in the manner of the Virgin Mary in Renaissance paintings, of her forthcoming sadness – of how she will be abandoned by Theseus. Alternatively, Vaughan’ s journal entry of 1948 implies that he understood Ariadne to have followed Theseus through the labyrinth and, given his uncertain grasp of the original myth, has included her in the scene.

The Minotaur:

The Minotaur of antiquity is traditionally depicted in Western art as a fearsome, tormented beast, half-man and half bull, complete with horns, hair and hooves. His rapacious, blood-thirsty nature made him one of the most formidable creatures of Greek mythology. In Vaughan’ s characterization he represents the allure of physical beauty and pleasure, in accordance with Gide’ s narrative. His narcissistic, open pose displays his athletic proportions and genitalia and reveals a character used to languorous, pleasure-seeking pursuits. He yawns and stretches, invincible and irresistible in his all-consuming world of hedonism. Lying on the floor before him is a pomegranate, a lemon and discarded petals torn from flowers in his indolent ennui . The figure is based on Vaughan’ s Reclining Nude , 1950, painted around this time. Even the lemon is retained in the composition.

Vaughan made a series of pencil studies to work out the figural arrangements and treatment of the complex space. The bed on which the Minotaur reclines, for example, is viewed from several anglessimultaneously in accordance with Cubist principles. Furthermore, the consistent tilting and flattening of form creates a stage-like setting, intentionally theatrical and stylized. The artificiality of this pictorial space has to support both the presence of Ariadne in the palace, and the presence of Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth. Similarly Vaughan’ s palette is un-naturalistically muted with only a few accents of colour provided by the blue sheet and the discarded fruits on the floor. The dark, claustrophobic atmosphere creates a sense of foreboding and assists in emphasizing the pale fleshy tones of the figures. A naturalistic treatment could not have been further from Vaughan’ s intention:

September, 1963:

All art is artifact, artificial, unreal. A parody of reality. Reality is simply the fleeting pain or joy that is inside you, which vanishes as soon as you try to refine it in shape or word. That is why all talk of realism in art is nonsense. Reality may be implied, intended, hinted at, even glimpsed, but never revealed or stated.

Vaughan admired Gide as both a writer and a man. He identified with him as a creative spirit and shared with him similar philosophical attitudes as well as sexual tastes. There is a passage that seems prophetic when we apply it to Vaughan:

I face death alone willingly. I’ ve tasted the best of life. It is pleasing to me to think that after I am gone, thanks

to me, mankind will be happier, better and freer. For the benefit of future man, I created my work. I lived.