Keith Vaughan

(British, 1912-1977)

Bradfields 91.5 x 71.4 cm. (36 x 28 1/8 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection
With Beaux Arts, Bath
With Austin/Desmond, Sunninghill
Private Collection
Sir John Craven (1940-2022)

Exhibited
London, Waddington Galleries, Keith Vaughan: New Paintings and Gouaches, March–April 1976 (no catalogue)
Manchester, Tib Lane Gallery, Keith Vaughan: Paintings, Gouaches and Drawings, 1976 (catalogue untraced)
Sunninghill, Austin/Desmond, Keith Vaughan: Paintings, Gouaches, Watercolours and Drawings 1936-1976, 1987, cat.no.82

Literature
Anthony Hepworth and Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, p.188, cat.no.AH575 (ill.b&w)

In the summer of 1958 Vaughan visited East Anglia looking for new landscapes and topographical subjects to paint. He made many pencil studies of the historical villages and medieval barns he discovered in Essex, paying particular attention to the association of organic and architectural motifs. In November the following year, the art critic Bryan Robertson drove him to Bradfields, the home of the artist Michael Ayrton, who had lived and worked there with his wife Elizabeth since 1951. His farmhouse on Harrow Hill Lane, almost a mile away from the village of Toppesfield, was surrounded by open fields and boasted a copse, a pond and a large barn which Ayrton had converted into his studio. He told Vaughan of his life-long association with the house and that he had even learnt to swim in the pond as a child. Bradfields had previously been the property of Sir Francis Meynell, the poet and book designer at the Nonesuch Press and had been painted by the celebrated Jamaican born artist Elsie Few. When the estate came up for sale in 1950, Ayrton was quick to purchase it. He explained to Vaughan that the property provided him with all the space and seclusion he required to write, paint and sculpt. Furthermore, it was far enough away from the bustle and distraction of London, but still close enough to visit, should the need arise. Vaughan was immediately taken by the idea of being able to escape the noise and commotion of the city himself and began to look for property in the area. In 1964, after two years searching, he bought a plot of land and three derelict workmen's cottages on the opposite side of Harrow Hill Lane to Bradfields. After considerable alterations, he made this his weekend retreat and summer home.

Bradfields is a late work, made two years before Vaughan's death. Most of the oil paintings from this time are devoid of human presence since landscape subjects took on a greater significance. Towards the end of 1975 his style underwent a transformation and nowhere is this more apparent than in his late Essex landscapes. In a relatively short space of time his imagery became so formalized that it is challenging to locate his abstracted shapes in nature. This stylistic reorganization manifested itself in various ways. For example, contours became more precise while compositions took on a compressed and tightly structured appearance. The brushwork and pigment application also became less painterly, contrasting with his previous, more tactile surfaces. This distillation, in terms of imagery and style, is apparent in the present work.

At the top of the composition is a narrow band of blue (denoting the skyline) from which the rest of the composition hangs. Beneath, banks of dark foliage rise up, broken, here and there, by raised brush work. In stark contrast below, Vaughan simultaneously evokes the cream-coloured walls of the house and the surrounding wheat and corn fields. Sap green, ochre and dark geometric blocks act as ciphers for painted shed doors and the fenestration on the house and outbuildings, while the triangular brush track at the right evokes the distinctive low gabling at Bradfields.

Vaughan was drawn to the unsurprising features of the Essex landscape, not least, the tranquil corner of his locality which featured farm buildings, ancient barns and open, hedgeless fields. This familiarity and direct experience of his subject lends his paintings a compelling power and authority. An individual element or an unnoticed but critical aspect of the landscape was sufficient, and aesthetically rich enough, to generate an entire composition. His ability to describe the natural forms he saw and reconfigure them within a coherently constructed composition, whereby abstraction and figuration are brought together within an equitable unanimity, was one of Vaughan's finest achievements.

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