Keith Vaughan

(British, 1912-1977)

Furnacemen 23.9 x 32.7 cm. (9 3/8 x 12 7/8 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
E.M. Arnold MBE
Private Collection, U.K.

Edmund Martin Arnold (1927-2017) was a long-standing trustee of the Leeds Art Fund and held the position of Honorary Treasurer between 1944 and 1954. The Fund was established in 1912 and is one of Britain's oldest art gallery "friends" organisations. Its core aim is to enrich the visual life of the city by making purchases of art works for display at the Leeds City Art Gallery, Temple Newsam House and Lotherton Hall. In his role with the fund Arnold often travelled to London and Paris on the hunt for exciting acquisitions for the city. It was on these trips that he also made personal acquisitions, building a fine collection of contemporary British and Continental works.

Between 1948-1950 Vaughan made a series of images depicting steelworkers in a foundry. In the present work three furnacemen take a tea break and tuck into their sandwiches. The image is related to a sketchbook he made entitled 'Steel', now housed in the Tate Britain archive. The theme of labour occurs often in his paintings and especially during the years following the war when Vaughan depicted labourers, manual workers, builders, road-workers, machine operators and coalmen in his gouaches, oil paintings and pencil studies. These stand as notable social documents. Furnacemen was painted only four years after the war during a period of significant optimism and patriotism in Britain, when toil and labour were associated with progress and regeneration.

The spontaneous, direct handling and interesting combination of pen, ink, gouache and wax crayon is typical of Vaughan's unique 'volatile medium', as he liked to called it (see, unpublished interview with Dr. Tony Carter and Keith Vaughan, 1963). The characteristic frothy textures equate with the smoke-filled and sulphurous atmosphere of the factory.

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for compiling this catalogue entry and to Anthony Hepworth for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. Gerard Hasting's book, Awkward Artefacts: The 'Erotic Fantasies' of Keith Vaughan, is published by Pagham Press in association with The Keith Vaughan Society.