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Lot Essay
Despite being a very early work, Boys at Ballet contains various pictorial ingredients found, later, in Vaughan’s mature paintings. These include the male nude subject matter, the fusion of figure and landscape and, even, the earthy-fleshy palette.
Vaughan’s first visit to the ballet was on Saturday, July 20, 1929; his mother took him to a matinee performance at Covent Garden to see Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. He did not know it at the time but they witnessed one of the last performances; the legendary impresario died one month later and the company folded. Vaughan was instantly besotted by the world of ballet and, during the 1930s, attended hundreds of performances at Covent Garden, Sadler’s Wells, the Hippodrome and the Alhambra theatres. It was, for him, “a world of longing … Something which meant so much to me, became part of me in my youth” (Keith Vaughan, unpublished journal entry, November 11, 1973). He took numerous photographs of the dancers from the gangway of the stalls and these formed the basis of paintings such as this.
The bodies in relation to each other, the groupings of figures and the athletic male form moving through space, all made a tremendous impact on the young Vaughan. These qualities revealed themselves in his paintings, where congregating figures move across the picture plane and are grouped into overlapping clusters. He admitted that the silent, balletic conversations between bodies, and the open limbs extending out into space went on to become his Assembly paintings. The ballet, and its idiosyncratic language of interpenetrating bodies, merging and melding into one another, directly informed the architecture of many of Vaughan’s figure compositions, (see Dancing Figures, 1951, Festival Dancers, 1951, and Dancer Waiting in the Wings, 1953). The symmetrical composition in the present work is, of course, derived from the choreography of Classical ballet. Similarly, the flattened backdrops and the pools of water, (which resemble stage spotlights), have theatrical origins.
This painting belonged to Vaughan’s mother. She was especially fond of it and it hung, pride of place, in her flat at 72 Lyncroft Gardens, off the Finchley Road. It is not too fanciful to imagine that Vaughan painted it for her, as a reminder of their visit to the Ballets Russes. John Symonds, a neighbour who lived below Mrs. Vaughan and kept her company in her final years, later purchased it.
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.
Vaughan’s first visit to the ballet was on Saturday, July 20, 1929; his mother took him to a matinee performance at Covent Garden to see Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. He did not know it at the time but they witnessed one of the last performances; the legendary impresario died one month later and the company folded. Vaughan was instantly besotted by the world of ballet and, during the 1930s, attended hundreds of performances at Covent Garden, Sadler’s Wells, the Hippodrome and the Alhambra theatres. It was, for him, “a world of longing … Something which meant so much to me, became part of me in my youth” (Keith Vaughan, unpublished journal entry, November 11, 1973). He took numerous photographs of the dancers from the gangway of the stalls and these formed the basis of paintings such as this.
The bodies in relation to each other, the groupings of figures and the athletic male form moving through space, all made a tremendous impact on the young Vaughan. These qualities revealed themselves in his paintings, where congregating figures move across the picture plane and are grouped into overlapping clusters. He admitted that the silent, balletic conversations between bodies, and the open limbs extending out into space went on to become his Assembly paintings. The ballet, and its idiosyncratic language of interpenetrating bodies, merging and melding into one another, directly informed the architecture of many of Vaughan’s figure compositions, (see Dancing Figures, 1951, Festival Dancers, 1951, and Dancer Waiting in the Wings, 1953). The symmetrical composition in the present work is, of course, derived from the choreography of Classical ballet. Similarly, the flattened backdrops and the pools of water, (which resemble stage spotlights), have theatrical origins.
This painting belonged to Vaughan’s mother. She was especially fond of it and it hung, pride of place, in her flat at 72 Lyncroft Gardens, off the Finchley Road. It is not too fanciful to imagine that Vaughan painted it for her, as a reminder of their visit to the Ballets Russes. John Symonds, a neighbour who lived below Mrs. Vaughan and kept her company in her final years, later purchased it.
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.