Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)

In July 1943 Vaughan was transferred from Wiltshire to the West Riding of Yorkshire. Like many southerners he had never been in the North of England before, and his response to its distinctive landscape was that of a tourist in a foreign land, fascinated by the strangeness of it all. He spent about a month billeted in an abandoned mill by a river near Keighley, "where the air is so exhilarating one feels breathlessly alive" (M. Yorke, Keith Vaughan his Life and Work, London, 1990, p. 83). From here he explored the moorland area around Bradford and Ilkley. The present work is based on a pencil sketch reproduced in his Journals and Drawings (see K. Vaughan, Journals and Drawings 1939-1965, London, 1966, p. 65), where the town is identified as Shipley, near Bradford. Its hallucinatory, unreal quality seems to convey Vaughan's still fresh reaction to what was for him an unknown landscape.

We are very grateful to Professor John Ball for providing the catalogue entry for this lot and lots 61, 66 & 68.