Seated figures

Vaughan called these highly worked drawings his ‘presentation’ or ‘table drawings’. He often gave them to friends or collectors. Their practical function, however, was to help him explore compositional devices and arrive at satisfying configurations and arrangements of forms and figures to be used in his paintings. Sometimes half a dozen or so such drawings would precede a painting. This example, executed around 1950, relates to a series of paintings he made at that time depicting nude figures in domestic interiors.

We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings, author of Drawing to a Close: The Final Journals of Keith Vaughan (Pagham Press) and Keith Vaughan: The Photographs (Pagham Press), for preparing this catalogue entry. He is currently working on an edition of Keith Vaughan’s life and work in Essex.