Keith Vaughan

The Estate of the Artist
Dr. Patrick Woodcock
Private Collection, U.K.

Unexamined out of frame. The sheet appears at least partially adhered to a backing support, but does not appear fully laid down. The sheet appears to be a leaf taken from a sketch pad with an unevenly cut left hand edge. There is a small, minor old tear to the top left corner, only visible upon very close inspection. There are signs of surface dirt and very light staining to the extreme edges of the sheet, including evidence of old tabs in the corners. This excepting the work appears in very good overall condition, with strong, fresh passages of pencil throughout. Housed behind glass in a simple light wooden frame, float-mounted against a white card backing. Unexamined out of 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, whose new book, Paradise Found and Lost: Keith Vaughan in Essex, has just been published by Pagham Press, for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

The subject of a group of figures gathering in an unspecified landscape is a constant theme in Vaughan’s work. He painted nine major canvases with the title Assembly of Figures. This drawing dates from the time he was working on the last one in the series, The Ninth Assembly – Eldorado Banal, (1976), which is now in Tate Britain.

In such works Vaughan considered the individual as subservient to the group; he aimed to achieve a balance between the interaction, connection and relationship of the figures, while simultaneously retaining their unique nature:

I would like to be able to paint a crowd – that abstract entity referred to by the sociologists as the masses. An amorphous compressed lump of impermanent shape reacting as a mass to environmental stimuli yet composed of isolated human egos retaining their own separate incommunicable identities. In the past artists have usually dealt with the problem of crowds by turning them into assemblies. Assemblies are orderly rhythmic groups of individuals which act and are acted upon by mutual consent…The behaviour of a crowd follows its own laws and generates its own energy. (Keith Vaughan, Some Notes on Painting, August 1964)

Gerard Hastings, 2016.