Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)

The male nude was at the very centre of Vaughan’s creative output; it preoccupied him for nearly fifty years. He painted it countless times and also made drawings, lithographs, illustrations and even a handful of sculptures where the nude male dominates the compositions. Here, two typically Vaughanesque figures (small-headed, thick-limbed, outwardly-gazing), recline on a kitchen table, their poses echoing and rhyming with each other.

During the early 1950s, it was Vaughan’s working habit to make a series of pencil and gouaches studies ahead of committing his forms to canvas in oil paint. The present work is one such study, though only the right figure relates to a known painting, Seated Figure 1951 (see A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils, 1946-1977, Bristol, 2012, p. 74).

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for compiling the note for this lot, and those for lots 47 and 67; his new book, Behind the Locked Door: Keith Vaughan's Erotic Work, is to be published in the Spring of 2017, by Pagham Press (www.thekeithvaughansociety.com).