Keith Vaughan was born in Selsey Bill in Sussex, and was considered one of the best figurative painters working in Britain in the post-war years. He did not attend art school but painted in his spare time whilst working for an advertising agency .in London from 1931-1938. During the war he was a conscientious objector, later serving with the Pioneer Corps and acting as an interpreter for German POWs. Vaughan taught at various London art schools, and became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1964. The themes of his paintings remained constant throughout his career: the male nude in the landscape, and pure landscape paintings.

Further reading:
Keith Vaughan Retrospective Exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 1962 (introduction by David Thompson)
Keith Vaughan, Journals 1939-1977, John Murray (Publishers) Ltd, London 1989

 

Glossary

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.