KEITH VAUGHAN | Landscape (Cubist)

Private Collection
Sale, Sotheby's London, 3rd November 1982, lot 306
Crane Kalman Gallery, London
Michael Parkin Fine Art, London
Private Collection
Sale, Bonhams London, 14th June 2005, lot 75, where acquired by the present owner

Anthony Hepworth and Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Company Ltd., Bristol, 2012, cat. no.AH327, p.123.

The canvas is original. The canvas undulates slightly. There are some scattered areas of very fine lines of reticulation visible to the darker brown pigment, with one or two further isolated fine lines of craquelure. There is a light and very small horizontal scratch at the centre of the extreme right edge. There is an extremely small abrasion in the light brown pigment in the lower left quadrant. There are one or two extremely minor flattened impasto tips towards the lower edge of the work, only visible upon very close inspection. There is light surface dust. Subject to the above the work appears in very good overall condition. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals florescence and retouching in the upper left quadrant; this has been very sensitively executed. The work is held within a wooden painted slip and a painted wooden frame. Please telephone 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 Awkward Artefacts: The 'Erotic Fantasies' of Keith Vaughan was published in 2017 by Pagham Press in Association with the Keith Vaughan Society, for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work and for compiling the below note. Vaughan’s Landscape belongs to a small group of closely related paintings he made between 1960 and 1961. In his studio record book he entitled them ‘Landscape’ and next to each catalogue entry wrote the word ‘Cubist’ in brackets. These may well be some of the first Essex landscapes that he painted under the inspiration of the isolated farms and villages of High Roding, Blackmore, Finchingfield and the curiously named little town of High Easter. Each is represented with a new formalized approach to landscape. Abstraction and observation are stitched into a harmonious unity. To the casual eye the composition appears totally abstract but on more considered viewing, pictorial clues begin to emerge. This post-Cubist interpretation of landscape is made up of a combination of architectural and organic forms. The vertical dark umber bands, for example, may be read as trunks, boughs and branches of trees. Slanted rooftops or gable ends are also hinted at.

Vaughan organizes these into a formal layout of ochres, greens and russets, browns and dark blue-blacks. Each section of the composition is inter-related and creates a coordinated patchwork of slanting and tilted, geometric forms. The style, characteristically, hovers midway between abstraction and representation. Similarly, the time of year seems equidistant between the seasons of autumn and winter…We are situated not in the isolation of the forest, or the familiarity of the town, but occupy a kind of hinterland as though perhaps arriving at the entrance to a village. (Gerard Hastings, Paradise Found & Lost: Keith Vaughan in Essex, Pagham Press, 2016, p.53).