Keith Vaughan

Sale, Phillips London, 14th November 1989, lot 73
Sale, Christie's London, 26th May 2011, lot 25, where acquired by the present owner

The sheet is laid down onto an acidic board. The pigments are strong and overall the work appears to be in excellent original condition. The work is presented in a brown window mount and aluminium frame. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Vaughan was in the habit of producing more than one version of the same subject while trying to work out compositional and formal qualities in his paintings. In 1953, for example, he made two oil paintings of The Bar, each quite distinctive, though related in colour, mood and subject. This gouache is a study, made the year before and is equally idiosyncratic. A series of drawings also exist, and these, as was his habit, were made in situ.

We see a group of men drinking and playing darts in a bar; the two in the foreground sit before their pints, one looking towards the other. In another closely related gouache by Vaughan, this pub can be identified, by the words on the window, as ‘The Black Horse’ in Rathbone Place.

Vaughan offers us a bleak, colourless scene and certainly not one that we would associate with the fabled accounts of sizzling Bohemian culture. During the 1940s and ’50s Francis Bacon, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, were frequenting ‘The Wheatsheaf’, ‘The French House’, ‘The Burgler’s Rest’, ‘The Marquis of Granby’, the fabled ‘Colony Room’ and ‘The Black Horse’. Vaughan also drank there with his housemates John Minton and Alan Ross. ‘The Black Horse’ pulled its first pint in 1809 and has continued to serve beer for over two hundred years. The Chartists met in the private upper rooms during the nineteenth century and Karl Marx made a speech there to a packed pub.

We could be forgiven for expecting a scene in a Soho pub to be a jovial, cheerful affair. Instead Vaughan presents us with ghost-like figures sitting in silence by the bar in an atmosphere of dark ennui. They hardly communicate with one another as they sit, lost in their separate, somber, alcohol-fuelled thoughts. Vaughan was working well within a tradition when he painted The Bar. British artists from William Hogarth to Edward Burra had depicted figures in alehouses in an attempt to convey something of the human condition and the follies of the soul.

Vaughan’s monochromatic use of colour and murky palette communicates something of the sadness, isolation and detachment of the men with their half-empty lives and their half-consumed pints. He is careful to place the viewer at one end of the bar, next to the pale figure, as we in turn, wait to be served in this macabre public house.

Gerard Hastings, 2015.