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Lot Essay
Figures Working in a Garden comes from one of Vaughan's wartime sketchbooks and is related to various other paintings of toiling soldiers (see Tree Felling, Ashton Gifford (1942-3) ill. p. 71: Keith Vaughan, His life and Work, Malcolm Yorke, Constable London 1990 and Camp Construction 1941, ill p. 55: Keith Vaughan, Paintings and Drawings, Osborne Samuel, 2007 ).
The five figures at work are most likely members of Vaughan's Non-Combatant company that was stationed at Codford in Wiltshire during the early 1940s. The walled garden is probably part of the Ashton Gifford House estate. Vaughan's time was spent mainly on digging ditches or working on the roads often in miserable weather. He recorded the activities of his fellow recruits in pencil drawings during the day and in the evenings, when he returned to his barracks, worked them up into more detailed images as in the present example. Army life limited his materials to pen, ink and occasionally gouache. This intensely atmospheric and romantic image looks forward to the major theme of figures in a landscape which was to preoccupy Vaughan for the rest of his career.
We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings for preparing the catalogue entry for lots 126, 128, 129 and 130. He is currently working on a book about Keith Vaughan to be published in 2012 (Vaughan's centenary year).
The five figures at work are most likely members of Vaughan's Non-Combatant company that was stationed at Codford in Wiltshire during the early 1940s. The walled garden is probably part of the Ashton Gifford House estate. Vaughan's time was spent mainly on digging ditches or working on the roads often in miserable weather. He recorded the activities of his fellow recruits in pencil drawings during the day and in the evenings, when he returned to his barracks, worked them up into more detailed images as in the present example. Army life limited his materials to pen, ink and occasionally gouache. This intensely atmospheric and romantic image looks forward to the major theme of figures in a landscape which was to preoccupy Vaughan for the rest of his career.
We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings for preparing the catalogue entry for lots 126, 128, 129 and 130. He is currently working on a book about Keith Vaughan to be published in 2012 (Vaughan's centenary year).