Keith Vaughan (1912-1977)

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.