Keith Vaughan Archives | Vanessa Clewes Salmon

Keith Vaughan CBE (1912-1977)

Today Keith Vaughan CBE (1912-1977) is considered to be one of Britain’s major figurative painters of the post-war years; he is best known for his powerful yet melancholy paintings and drawings of the male nude in two dimensional landscapes.

Devastated by the death of his brother at the hands of enemy fire at the very beginning of the war, Vaughan registered as a conscientious objector and was later conscripted into the Non Combatant Corps, the St John’s Ambulance Brigade and as a German interpreter in a German PoW camp. After the war he shared a studio with his close friends and major influences, Graham Sutherland and John Minton. It was through these friendships that he became an integral part of the post war Neo-Romantic circle, however he rapidly developed an idiosyncratic style concentrating on studies of vulnerable male figures in near abstract landscapes.

Vaughan taught at the Camberwell College of Arts, the Central School of Art and later at the Slade; in 1962 The Whitechapel Gallery staged a major retrospective of his work.

A gay man troubled by his sexuality, Keith Vaughan is known largely through his journals, some of which were published during his lifetime, but more extensively after his suicide in 1977. The centenary of his birth was celebrated with an exhibition ‘Keith Vaughan: Romanticism to Abstraction’ at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester in 2012.

Keith Vaughan, Standing Figure

signed and dated 1961

19 March, 2017