Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)

Vaughan made numerous drawings during the war while serving in the non-combatant corps. His surviving wartime sketchbooks demonstrate aim to capture the essence of his subjects or the genius loci (spirit of place) of a specific landscape. His pictorial challenge was a formal one: how to arrive at a visually satisfying statement without resorting to mere illustration or illusionistic reproduction. The solution lay, as it did for the older Graham Sutherland and the younger John Craxton, in making a paraphrase rather than a comprehensive reproduction of nature. The use of drawing was crucial in this pictorial reduction. It enabled Vaughan to reveal the fundamental character of a subject and refine his formal picture-making process.

We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings for his assistance in cataloguing the present lot. Gerard Hastings is the author of Drawing to a Close: the Final Journals of Keith Vaughan, Pagham Press, 2012 and Keith Vaughan: The Photographs, Pagham Press, 2013.