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KEITH VAUGHAN (1912-1977)
Country Labourers, 1944
Gouache, pastel and ink on paper
Signed and dated in ink lower right
12 x 17.7cm
Exh: Lefevre Gallery 1946
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| 'The war years had been a period of cultural isolation
and when contact with mainland Europe was re-established,
there was a feeling that the political defeat of France
had wider cultural implications. The artistic hegemony
of Paris in the world of the visual arts had been broken.
There was a wild upsurge of painterly patriotism, heavily
dependent on the fairly recent popularisation of the works
of Samuel Palmer and Calvert. A whole group of painters
was seduced into the bypaths of British Romanticism as
it was hopefully called. Gnarled hawthorns abounded, apple
orchards proliferated; hop-poles ranged significantly
across many a canvas; barbed wire was coaxed into unexpected
significances. Vaughan was often, quite wrongly, associated
with this short-lived phenomenon, largely because several
of its members were his friends. But his painterly concerns
were far removed from the quirky inelegances of Michael
Ayrton, the sybaritic rococo fantasies of John Minton,
or even the topographical sensibilities of a painter of
the reputation of Sutherland. Superficially it seemed
at the time, that Vaughan's closest affinity was with
John Craxton, who was also concerned, though to a slighter
degree, with the human body'. |
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