Keith Vaughan

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Lord Gordon Lennox
Private Collection

London, Marlborough New London Gallery, Keith Vaughan: New Paintings, 1964, cat. no.53.

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Company Ltd., Bristol, 2012, cat. no.AH458, illustrated, p.162.

Stable card. There is a small scuff and fleck of paint loss towards the top of the extreme left hand edge. This excepting the work appears to be in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals some areas of fluorescence in keeping with the nature of the materials and not suggestive of retouching. Housed in a thin gilt frame and set within a cream linen mount. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
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During 1964, the year that Vaughan painted this work, he also bought a property in Essex called Harrow Hill, near the small village of Toppesfield. The house and its garden and the neighbouring landscape were to go on to provide him with inspiration for the following decade. The present work is the first of a series of semi-abstracted paintings of nearby hamlets, farms and villages that Vaughan depicted (see also Gainsford End (1966), Harrow Hill (1966), High Easter (1967), Flooded Landscape, Essex (1968), Blackmore End (1971), Mortimer’s Farm (1971), Farm at Hedingham (1972), Bradley Park (1974), Finchingfield (1975) and Bradfields (1975)).

What, at first, appears to be a totally abstract composition is, in fact, a highly structured composition whose forms are derived from nature. Triangular gable ends, the block-like forms of buildings and the edges of farm outhouses, each interpenetrate one another, set off against an energetic sky-blue background. Vaughan’s debt to both Cézanne and Analytical Cubism is apparent in his structural arrangement of his forms, his choice of palette and his formal organization of the paint. 

`Here we see Vaughan departing from a flatter, analytical abstract form of landscape. The fevered, highly agitated tessellation of the painted surface gives the feeling of an explosive atmosphere that was surely Vaughan’s intention' (Anthony Hepworth: Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Company Ltd., Bristol, 2012).

Gerard Hastings

Gerard Hasting's book on Keith Vaughan’s photography is due to be published in June by Pagham Press.