Lagoon, Boys on a Punt

Details

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)
Lagoon, Boys on a Punt
signed 'Vaughan' (lower right)
oil on canvas
20 x 30 in. (50.8 x 76.2 cm.)
Painted in 1948.

Provenance

with Redfern Gallery, London, where purchased by the present owner in April 1950 for £55.

Literature

Exhibition catalogue, Keith Vaughan Retrospective, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1962, p. 47, no. 80.

Exhibited

London, Lefevre Gallery.
Birmingham, Museum and Art Gallery, Six Contemporary British Painters: William Coldstream, Ivon Hitchens, Frances Hodgkins, John Piper, Keith Vaughan, Ethel Walker, October - November 1950, no. 39. London, Arts Council, Arts Council Gallery, Three Young Collectors, November - December 1952, no. 36: this exhibition travelled to Nottingham, Chapel Bar Gallery, December 1952 - January 1953; Bristol, City Art Gallery, January 1953; Lincoln, Art Gallery, February 1953; Newcastle, Hatton Gallery, March 1953; and Arbroath, Art Gallery, April 1953.
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan Retrospective, March - April 1962, no. 80, as 'Lagoon with Figures'.

Special Notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

The original title in Vaughan's record book for the present work was Lagoon with Figures in a Boat. On leaving the army in 1946, Vaughan was able for the first time to engage seriously and continuously with oil paint. Prior to this, circumstances confined his painting to gouache, a medium in which he attained great skill. For his first year or two in civilian life he translated the subjects and textures of gouache straight into oils, with little concern for the quite different properties and potentialities of the new medium. But during 1948, with a new confidence and freedom, he produced about forty oil paintings, mostly landscapes with figures, but also pure landscapes, still lifes and interiors with figures, and in these he for the first time uses paint idiomatically. The present work typifies the gentle, slightly elegiac mood of many of these pictures. A related work from circa 1948, (25 x 33 in.), Water Trees and Figures II (fig. 1) is in the collection of the British Council.

J.B.

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