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Lot Essay
Vaughan is often associated with figure painting and especially with the male nude. Nevertheless he produced a considerable number of fine landscape paintings, made with the same combination of sensuousness and analytical rigour. Painterly applications of pigment are counterbalanced by formalised compositions in his landscape subjects as they are in his figure paintings. Before he could produce a landscape painting, however, it was important that Vaughan became acquainted with the terrain:
A landscape must be familiar otherwise I only see the superficial dramatic aspects that any other sightseer sees. The ones that have revealed the most to me are the ones outside the window of my studio. Trees & sky & some man-made objects such as a house - that is enough to start the reaction. If there is water too, then it is almost perfect - I don't mean that it should be empty. A landscape can only be measured by its remoteness from, & similarity to, human beings. But they must be as remote as the landscape is remote, however familiar & visible. It may take anything from three days or three months to make this contact. What I like best is a small, compact, unspectacular landscape, combing as much of the three basic elements - air, earth & water - within a space not so large that I couldn't walk around it in half & hour. I do not like views or mountains but I like the sea only when looking landward - in one such landscape there would be enough material for a lifetime. There would be no need to change because the landscape is changing each hour of the day & week of the year. The longer one watches, the more ones sees. (Keith Vaughan: Unpublished Studio Notes, late 1950s).
In 1959 Vaughan visited Iowa, in the USA, for six months. He taught at the State University there and the experience had a profound psychological effect in terms of boosting his self-confidence as an artist and his approach to painting in general. He was very much taken by the landscape he discovered there and immersed himself in it, taking long walks and travelling round in his car to familiarize himself with the topography. The experience motivated him to produce a series of fine landscapes (see also Landscape with River in Flood (1959), AH301, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils, A. Hepworth and I. Massey), where the influence of Cézanne can be felt. The fusion between abstraction and figuration to be found in the present work is typical of Vaughan's approach to painting at this time. Seemingly abstract, the tilted planes, blocks of colour and geometric configurations, do in fact derive from farm building, barns doors and windows. The areas of blank canvas were a feature of Vaughan's paintings during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He spoke of this, saying:
the conclusion may be so obvious that it can be implied rather than stated as in some late Cézanne's and Cubist paintings where considerable areas of the canvas are left untouched. (Keith Vaughan: Unpublished Interview with Tony Carter, 1963).
We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings, author of Drawing to a Close: the Final Journals of Keith Vaughan (Pagham Press), and co-author of Keith Vaughan (Lund Humphries), for his assistance in cataloguing the present lot.
A landscape must be familiar otherwise I only see the superficial dramatic aspects that any other sightseer sees. The ones that have revealed the most to me are the ones outside the window of my studio. Trees & sky & some man-made objects such as a house - that is enough to start the reaction. If there is water too, then it is almost perfect - I don't mean that it should be empty. A landscape can only be measured by its remoteness from, & similarity to, human beings. But they must be as remote as the landscape is remote, however familiar & visible. It may take anything from three days or three months to make this contact. What I like best is a small, compact, unspectacular landscape, combing as much of the three basic elements - air, earth & water - within a space not so large that I couldn't walk around it in half & hour. I do not like views or mountains but I like the sea only when looking landward - in one such landscape there would be enough material for a lifetime. There would be no need to change because the landscape is changing each hour of the day & week of the year. The longer one watches, the more ones sees. (Keith Vaughan: Unpublished Studio Notes, late 1950s).
In 1959 Vaughan visited Iowa, in the USA, for six months. He taught at the State University there and the experience had a profound psychological effect in terms of boosting his self-confidence as an artist and his approach to painting in general. He was very much taken by the landscape he discovered there and immersed himself in it, taking long walks and travelling round in his car to familiarize himself with the topography. The experience motivated him to produce a series of fine landscapes (see also Landscape with River in Flood (1959), AH301, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils, A. Hepworth and I. Massey), where the influence of Cézanne can be felt. The fusion between abstraction and figuration to be found in the present work is typical of Vaughan's approach to painting at this time. Seemingly abstract, the tilted planes, blocks of colour and geometric configurations, do in fact derive from farm building, barns doors and windows. The areas of blank canvas were a feature of Vaughan's paintings during the late 1950s and early 1960s. He spoke of this, saying:
the conclusion may be so obvious that it can be implied rather than stated as in some late Cézanne's and Cubist paintings where considerable areas of the canvas are left untouched. (Keith Vaughan: Unpublished Interview with Tony Carter, 1963).
We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings, author of Drawing to a Close: the Final Journals of Keith Vaughan (Pagham Press), and co-author of Keith Vaughan (Lund Humphries), for his assistance in cataloguing the present lot.