Keith Vaughan

Marlborough Fine Art, London, where acquired by the present owners in 1965

Possibly London, Marlborough Fine Art, Summer Exhibition, 1965 (ex-catalogue);
Possibly Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria (details untraced).

Stable board. There is a tiny spot of loss to the extreme upper edge, not visible in the present frame. There is reticulation to areas including, but not limited to the dark burgundy pigment lower right; the top and bottom centre of the figure group and the blue area in the upper right hand quadrant. This excepting the work appears in very good overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. Housed in a gilt wood frame, set within a cream linen-textured mount. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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In a letter to John Lehmann, dating from the early 1940s, Vaughan wrote of his conception of mankind:

In this setting one could hardly expect to find man standing confidently alone. But in huddled groups, separate forms hardly distinguishable, merged together they create a certain steady glow of humanness (Keith Vaughan, undated letter to John Lehmann c. 1942).

He might well have been describing this cluster of three or four luminous figures standing before dark, lush undergrowth. There is a coalescence of form as torsos and limbs collide and come together. Vaughan’s characteristic bullet-shaped heads and undulating shoulders, interpenetrate and are described in various succulent ochres and pinks. The fleshy pigment, delivered to the surface of the canvas with an agitated, loaded brush, is employed less to describe the appearance of skin but rather to act as a tangible equivalent of it.

This is man in his natural environment, unidentified and universalised. The figures are disengaged and liberated from the trappings and sophistications of everyday life. No hint of city values invades or infects their situation; there are no visual reminders of the grind of daily employment, of economic ideologies, consumerist concerns or social hierarchies. It is impossible to determine if Vaughan’s figures are farmers, lawyers or road-sweepers since the absence of overalls, suits and uniforms preclude social identification. Furthermore he replaces narrative with a sense of timeless detachment and this mood characterises most of his major figure groups at this time.

In the year Vaughan painted this canvas he wrote:

The heroic nude is out, for me – that monumental, dignified prototype. There are few single figures, but crowds making a single corporate form – crowds, masses, unidentifiable crowds. Before, I made assemblies of figures, people making studied gestures to each other. Or single melancholic figures. Now I’m trying to continue the two things…. I’m not concerned with a classical Poussinesque movement, or a mass in happy association, but a crowd…. jolting, jostling and pushing, when every contour has an abrasive action on every other contour. (Keith Vaughan, Studio International, November 1964).  

We are grateful to Gerard Hasting for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work. His book, Keith Vaughan: The Photographs, has recently been published by Pagham Press.