
Christopher Dawson
Head of Department
Sold for £12,800 inc. premium
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Provenance
With The Redfern Gallery, London
Dr. Rodney Long, 1969
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 10 October 1990, lot 147
With Mercury Gallery, London, 22 January 1991, where acquired by
Private Collection, Israel
Their Sale; Bonhams, London, 29 May 2013, lot 61, where acquired by
Private Collection, U.K.
The underlying pen and ink drawing of Boy with an Apple was made in 1945. Passages of blank paper are visible through the mesh of inky lines. Vaughan reworked the drawing in the 1960s, along with many other examples of his wartime work. This involved tightening up the original drawing and obliterating passages which he subsequently considered superfluous. Whenever he encountered difficulties with his large-scale oil paintings or underwent what he called a 'fallow period', he would return to old pencil drawings and pen and ink studies to revise them in this way. More often than not, this involved making additions to the original drawing with gouache and obliterating unsatisfactory details with oil pastels, which he had discovered on a teaching visit to America in 1959. In the present work, sensitive white gouache embellishments are applied in hatchings over the under drawing. These define the boy's anatomical forms, while the dark, inky background has been added to emphasise and push the figure forwards. Similarly, the passage of green oil pastel, is also a late addition which assists in defining the lower body of the figure while also suggesting, perhaps, a grassy field.
We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for compiling this catalogue entry.