Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)

Vaughan is usually thought of as primarily a painter of male nudes in a landscape, and perhaps his greatest achievements are in that field. Yet about half of the roughly 620 oils he produced in his working life (1946-76) are pure landscapes. These include some of his finest pictures, and recognisably are of the settings inhabited by his figures. Village under Snow is one of the most haunting of these landscapes. He produced 10 oils in 1955, all of them 'pure' landscapes. Compared to earlier works, these pictures exhibit a marked gain in richness and freedom, and a move towards greater abstraction, very likely elements that he took from the 1952 de Staël exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery in London, which had opened his eyes to the possibilities of bridging the abstract/representational gap that had always fascinated him and bothered him. A companion picture from the same year, Snow on Hampstead Heath (16 x 20 in.), sold in these rooms 17 November 2006, lot 59, £74,400 (fig. 1).

J.B.