Keith Vaughan

The Estate of the Artist
Prunella Clough
Peter Adam
Private Collection, London

London, Menier Gallery, Clough and Vaughan: Visions and Recollections, 15th April - 2nd May 2014, cat. no.88, illustrated

The sheet is attached to a supporting board with two tabs at the upper horizontal edge. The left and lower edges of the sheet are uneven which appears to indicate that the work was removed from a sketchbook. There is some very light surface dirt and staining to the edges of the sheet which cannot be seen when the work is mounted. The graphite is strong and overall the picture appears to be in very good condition. The work is presented in a window mount and a square profile oak frame. Please contact 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, author of Drawing to a Close: The Final Journals of Keith Vaughan and Keith Vaughan the Photographs (Pagham Press, publications), for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

The subject of male bathers is, perhaps, Vaughan’s most important theme; he painted numerous canvases and gouaches depicting the male nude basking on a riverbank, lounging at the beach, or sunbathing by a pond. The present work is a study for such a work and comes from a sketchbook made in 1952. It contained a series of pencil studies depicting small groups of figures standing, bending, stretching, crouching or leaning against an embankment. It seems that Vaughan was trying to locate a design for a painting and, in the process, created a series of variations on a theme.

His approach to anatomy in the present work is typical of his style in the early 1950s. The human form is summarily treated and reduced to its essentials: small, circular heads, articulated limbs with particular anatomical features emphasized such as navels, kneecaps and nipples. The treatment of the figures is typically considered in formal and linear terms.