Keith Vaughan

Private Collection
Their sale, Christie's London, 9th March 1990, lot 226, where purchased by the present owner

London, New Grafton Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Drawings and Paintings, 1985, cat. no.46.

Anthony Hepworth and Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, cat. no.570, p.187.

There are two horizontal creases in the board toward the centre of the left and right vertical edges. At the left this has resulted in some lifting to the paint. At the right there is a small associated surface tear resulting in some loss. There is a small knock to the upper right horizontal edge and some surface dirt and light abrasion at the extreme edges, most prominent at the lower right vertical edge. There is a fine line of craquelure in the upper right quadrant. There is reticulation in some of the darker pigments of the composition, particularly where the paint is very thin. With the exception of the above the work appears to be in good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of florescence. The work is float mounted in a glazed wooden frame with a linen mount. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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We are grateful to Gerard Hastings, author of Drawing to a Close: The Final Journals of Keith Vaughan and Keith Vaughan the Photographs (Pagham Press, publications), for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

This painting was started in 1965 soon after Vaughan returned from an Easter visit to Morocco with his friend and doctor, Patrick Woodcock. He hired a car and drove all over the country, noting the changes in the quality of the terrain and recording his journey in his journal. The ochre-coloured landscape of the Atlas mountains and hot, sandy beaches made a deep impression on him: 'Marvellous landscape driving up the coastal road from Agadir. Dry, luminous, scrubby foothills – cinnamon pink to ochre – white dotted with dark olives & patches of glowing saturated colour….Tremendous intensity of light, burning sun.' (Keith Vaughan, Journals (unpublished), 19 April 1965).

On his return, Vaughan’s palette intensified and became warmer and more succulent. He had always been interested in the theme of assembling groups of figures and had been particularly struck by the exotic crowds he discovered gathering outside the mosques at Taroudannt and at religious meetings he witnessed in Ait-Kassem. The present work is probably based on one such encounter in the market at Agadir. The interpenetrating figures, assembled outside the bazaar, are simultaneously conceived in both abstract and figurative terms. Vaughan establishes them into serried ranks of individuals, each amalgamating with their neighbours. This figural integration became a hallmark of his later compositions. Translucent pigments are lightly brushed over various forms that appear ghost-like from beneath veils of paint. He wrote in his journal at the time he commenced this painting: 'I am steering closer towards the point of total non-figuration, moving towards a sort of musical interpretation – an abstracted interpretation… like a musician, the subject matter becomes less and less important as the painting takes shape… The subject-matter is simply what gets one going and where you kick off from.' (Keith Vaughan: Interview with Hugh Sykes in Isis, discussing the Bear Lane Gallery exhibition, 1965).

Eight years later he reworked much of this composition until it reached its present state. It was not uncommon for him to return to works and simplify his design and, occasionally, as he has done here, added fresh colour accents. By the early 1970s, when Vaughan completed this painting, he had attained a critical balance between the value of the paint and the significance of the subject matter; hitherto figuration had always retained the upper hand. His paintings now possessed equilibrium between the representation of the object and the vehicle of its expression, namely the stuff with which it was painted.