Keith Vaughan

Collection of Sir Frederick Gibberd

His estate sale, Christies London, 26 October 1994, lot 101, where acquired by the present owner

As a conscientious objector, Vaughan joined the Non-Combatant Corps and was stationed at Bulford Camp in Wiltshire. Army life precluded easel painting or working with oils, and this forced him to become more inventive and economical with his selection of working materials. While recording his comrades at their ablutions, Showers at Bulford Camp also presages the horrors of the death camps of Nazi Germany.

'An artist who finds himself in the position of an ordinary soldier in the army can, I think, take one of two courses. He can put away his paints and brushes, forget all about his craft, submit himself without reserve to his new experiences, and hope that he will return to his work afterwards richer and wiser. On the other hand, he can trim his sails to a minimum, if it is only a note book and a pencil, and try and keep something going…On New Year’s Day, 1941, the first thing that went into my brand new army haversack was the largest drawing book it would accommodate and an unbreakable bottle of black ink…I now spent my off-duty hours with a pad on my knee on my bed in a barrack room. For a year I drew the raw material that was in front of me…To accommodate my slightly increased ambitions, I added to my materials one or two more bottles of ink, two pots of gouache and a few crayons. With these I hoped to be able to recover something of the solidity and depth of oil, while satisfying the requirements of intermittent work and total concealment of the results…At first I tried making brief notes as the subjects occurred to me with the intention, later on, of working them out. But this I found simply tapped the current of one’s energy without leading anywhere, and the accumulation of notes quickly outgrew the possibility of ever utilising them. So I seized on one or two out of the stream, and these I tried to carry as near completion as I could with the medium and the facilities I had to work with.' (Keith Vaughan, quoted in, Lefevre Gallery Exhibition Catalogue, May 1944).

Gerard Hastings.