Keith Vaughan

(British, 1912-1977)

Yorkshire Village 24.8 x 46.3 cm. (9 3/4 x 18 1/4 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With The Leicester Galleries, London, June 1956, where acquired by
Michael Greenwood, thence by descent to the present owners
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, The Leicester Galleries, Exhibition of Works by Keith Vaughan, June 1956, cat.no.5

Literature
Anthony Hepworth and Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, p.101, cat.no.AH231, (ill.b&w, where dated 1956)

While serving in the Non-Combatant Corps during the war, Vaughan was stationed in the heart of the Yorkshire countryside at Eden Camp, near Malton. Whenever he could wangle a pass out of the barracks, he took long walks and cycled around the surrounding villages, making drawings and filling his sketchbooks with pen and ink studies. This marked the start of an enduring love-affair with the Yorkshire landscape. One of his war-time journal entries describes the type of landscape (not dissimilar to the present work) which generally attracted him:

April 28, 1944: I walked to down the lane to Welburn with the neat houses and old stone and ivy walls and then across the fields, skirting the edges of ploughland and low hedges, down to the edge of the wood, over the stream and up the steep bank, knee deep in dry leaves.

Having little or no interest in the picturesque or scenic landscape, Vaughan was naturally drawn to a type of terrain which carried with it evidence of man's intervention. This revealed itself in the form of rural buildings such as cottages, barns and outhouses, or the spires of village churches which could be seen while approaching from the outskirts. In one of his many studio notebooks he outlined where his interest in landscape lay:

A landscape must be familiar otherwise I only see the superficial dramatic aspects that any other sightseer sees...Trees & sky & some man-made objects such as a house – that is enough to start the reaction. If there is water too, then it is almost perfect – I don't mean that it should be empty. A landscape can only be measured by its remoteness from, & similarity to, human beings. But they must be as remote as the landscape is remote, however familiar & visible (Keith Vaughan, Unpublished and Undated Studio Notes, circa 1959).

Over the course of 1955/56 Vaughan produced a series of predominantly black and green oil paintings depicting landscapes he had encountered on recent visits to Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Sussex, Derbyshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Yorkshire (see also Dale Landscape, 1955; Richmond in Yorkshire, 1955; Pickering Castle, 1956). Yorkshire Village, a tightly constructed design, is one of the most resolved and technically accomplished of these. The horizontal row of interconnecting workers' cottages, vertical factory chimney and triangular church spire carry enough formal interest to provide an entire pictorial statement. The orderly arrangement of architectural shapes, sandwiched between distant trees and foreground fields, also demonstrates his on-going interest in subjects containing the significant forms he required to build a satisfyingly resolved composition. Another of his notebooks, from a few years later, articulates this aesthetic principle:

October 16, 1958: Necessity for compositional structure to run right through to the edges – disregarding identity of forms...not enough simply to balance shapes within the area. This is a subjectively obvious fact of which I have only just become conscious in words...the continuing lines are never obvious and are constantly interrupted by counter rhythms and thrust back and forth in space.

Several other paintings from this period demonstrate a comparable interest in interlocking geometric shapes, (see Farm in Sussex, 1956 and Green Vertical Landscape, 1955). This formalised approach to picture making provided Vaughan with an opportunity to explore subject matter which hovered midway between abstraction and figuration, pictorial territory in which he was at his most comfortable. Lozenge, square and oblong forms, the building blocks of his visual language, were readily provided by the irregularity of the windows, doors and walls of this unidentified Yorkshire village.

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for compiling this catalogue entry.