Keith Vaughan

The Artist's Estate
Redfern Gallery, London, where acquired by Lord & Lady Attenborough, 12th June 1984

The canvas has been re-lined. The canvas is sound. There are two or three areas of very fine craquelure in the corners of the canvas. There are a few tiny spots of studio matter in the upper left quadrant. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals areas of fluorescence to the upper central elements and further scattered spots, possibly earlier retouching, to the lower right and upper left quadrants. The work is held within a painted and gilt simple wood frame with a linen slip. Please telephone 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, who's new book, Behind the Locked Door: Keith Vaughan's Erotic Work is to be published in the Spring of 2017, by Pagham  Press, for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work. (www.thekeithvaughansociety.com)

This early oil painting, dating from the mid to late 1930s, already demonstrates Vaughan’s interest in combining architectural elements with natural forms. He was still exploring the same pictorial ingredients forty years later, in his late Essex landscapes. Chimneystacks, regular fenestration, rooftops, gable-ends, barns and outhouses supply the formal, organized elements that he was habitually attracted to. Their orderliness and warm tonalities are played off against the more organic shapes and a range of greens supplied by the surrounding fields and trees.

Vaughan’s preference was for landscape that retained evidence of man’s involvement and therefore, local houses, gardens, cattle shed, wooden huts, copses and orchards tend to feature in his paintings. He added further pictorial accents to his compositions later by incorporating abandoned agricultural objects, distant church towers and fence posts. Other recognizable features that appealed to his sensibility include hedgeless pasturelands with views across open fields towards distant foliage, patchwork meadowlands and squared-off farm buildings. Even when there are no figures included, we are always reminded of man’s presence in nature in Vaughan’s landscapes. His preferred scene was, at once, natural and man-made – a landscape that retained evidence of human intervention. He was drawn to farmland rather than rolling hills and arable landscapes shaped by man, rather than awe-inspiring mountain scenes. This preoccupation with things intimately idyllic and privately pastoral can, of course, be traced back to William Blake and Samuel Palmer. The presence of man in their work, too, is often implied rather than directly represented and, moreover, the evidence of man’s good management and husbandry communicates something health-giving and moral to the viewer.

Gerard Hastings.