Keith Vaughan

Anthony Hepworth Fine Art, Bath, where acquired by the present owner, 1st October 1995

London, Olympia, Keith Vaughan, 26th Feburary - 3rd March 2002, cat. no.432.

The sheet is not laid down, but is adhered to a mount via strips at all four corners. The sheet is a leaf taken from a sketch pad, and has a perforated left hand edge, with instances of resultant loss in this area. There is some staining to the sheet, and a few scattered traces of very light, early foxing apparent, but this excepting the work appears in very good overall condition. Housed behind glass in a thick gilt frame, set within a cream card mount. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
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We are grateful to Gerard Hastings, author of Drawing to a Close: The Final Journals of Keith Vaughan (Pagham Press) and Keith Vaughan the Photographs (Pagham Press), for his assistance in compiling the catalogue note for the present work, which is available at sothebys.com.

Vaughan spent the war as a non-combatant labourer in the Pioneer Corps. He was stationed first in Wiltshire, where he made the present work, then moved to Derbyshire and was finally transferred to Eden Camp in Yorkshire. Despite the exhausting daily routine of road building, stacking corn and filling sandbags, a complete lack of privacy and being unable to find an adequate workspace, Vaughan nevertheless went on painting and drawing. Life under canvas precluded setting up a functioning studio and, as a consequence, he was unable to work with oil paint. Instead he produced a series of small, intense sepia ink drawings and gouaches sometimes combined with various mixed media.

Although he was never an official war artist, Vaughan produced some remarkable wartime images, recording life in the army and the effects of the war. The War Artists’ Advisory Committee purchased twelve of his works and these are now housed in the Imperial War Museum (see Under Canvas in Winter (1942), A Barrack-room (1942) and Echo of the Bombardment (1942) etc.).

The year before he painted Soldiers Erecting a Tent, Vaughan wrote in his journal:

‘Codford. The rank smell of canvas and warm men. Misery and discomfort of living in tents. Everything covered with dust and ants.’ (Vaughan, unpublished journal entry, June 1941)

‘At six o’clock the guard’s cane smacks the taut canvas of the tent. It is pitch dark. Nobody moves but everyone is instantly awake and weighing the agony of getting up against the penalty of staying in the warm cocoon of blankets. The guard can be heard in the distance thrashing the canvas of the other tents. Presently a tremor passes through the tent like the disturbance of sediment at the bottom of a heated flask. A hand emerges from its blanket and gropes for matches to light a candle. Sleepy but emphatic curses break out. When it is already late everyone gets up together and fights their shivering way into clothes, burrowing into the ruined heaps of kit to find their belongings. With practised skill we knead the blankets into the regulation mould and crawl through the opening, forgetting always the hooks which hoist us back again by the loops on our trousers. Outside the moon is still high and we start the perilous journey over slippery mud and through the minefiled of guy-ropes and tent pegs to the marquee…orderlies bring in the heavy dixies of tea and porridge blanketed in steam… it is too dark to see what we are eating but we bend over the tin bowls letting the steam pour over our faces and thaw out our fingers on the mugs of tea.’ (Vaughan, Journals and Drawings, p. 48, Alan Ross, London, 1966.)