KEITH VAUGHAN | Landscape in Missouri

Freddy Mayor
Lettice Coleman, and thence by descent to the late owners

London, Matthiesen Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Recent Paintings, 1960, cat. no.39 (as Missouri Landscape);
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Retrospective, March - April 1962, cat. no.233.

Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Company Ltd, Bristol, 2012, cat. no.AH304, p.117.

The canvas is original. The canvas undulates very slightly in places. There is a small area of very fine lines of craquelure in the blue pigment just above centre, only visible upon close inspection, with a small number of more minor instances largely confined to the lower third of the work. There is a very small area of reticulation to the black pigment to the right of centre. There is a faint diagonal scuff towards the upper edge just below centre and a further faint horizontal scuff to the blue rectangular element in the lower right quadrant, with possible further more minor instances elsewhere. There is light surface dirt and a few small instances of studio detritus and surface matter in places. This excepting, the work appears in very good overall condition. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of retouching. The work is held in gilt painted frame. 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, whose new book on Keith Vaughan’s graphic art is to be published later in the year by Pagham Press in Association with the Keith Vaughan Society, for his kind assistance with the catalouging of the present work, and for compiling the catalogue essay. In 1952 Vaughan visited the Nicolas de Staël exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery in Bond Street. He realized that direct representationalism was stifling his development and began to evolve a synthesis between observation and abstraction. His pictures now became composed of formalized passages of pigment fashioned into patches, blocks and slabs of colour. This enabled him to evoke the sensation of landscape and recreate the experience of it, rather than merely depict its appearance.

At the beginning of 1959 Vaughan travelled to Iowa State University in America to work there as painter in residence. That spring he hired a car and explored the surrounding landscape, always on the look-out for new subjects. On these field-trips he took with him pencils and sketchbooks making visual notations as he went. The resulting drawings were worked up later into paintings when he returned to his studio. He headed south to Missouri and visited various places including Keokuk, Alexandra, Palmyra and Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi.

Vaughan was particularly attracted to agricultural landscapes, farms with formal, plotted fields and rolling meadowlands dotted with barns or punctuated by repeated fence-posts. He felt able to translate these formalised, geometric shapes into pictorial statements and incorporate them into the compositions of his paintings. In 1959 he produced many canvases depicting such rural subjects, (see also Farm at Cedar Rapids and Iowa Farm I & II).