Keith Vaughan 1912-1977
Landscape, November 1970, 1970
oil on canvas
39 x 35 ins
signed and titled verso 'Keith Vaughan, Landscape November 1970'

Provenance
The Ford Motor Company Ltd



The critic Bryan Robertson once described Keith Vaughan’s paintings as 'representing an inhabited Arcadia that you can explore and enter', an observation as relevant to the late almost completely abstract landscapes such as this as it is to the neo-Romanticism that marked his earliest work; the structure and sense of the human scale and figure is always present even in the purest of his landscape subjects. Painted in 1970, when he was spending an increasing amount of time at his cottage in Essex, Landscape November 1970 would seem to reflect something of the considerable impact the flashing light and steely blue skies of East Anglia had on his late style. Though depressed in the last decade of his life by the pervasive influence of American contemporary art, total abstraction and minimalism in particular, his painting at this time nonetheless extends and develop the semi-abstract style Vaughan had practised since the early 50s under the impact of Nicolas de Stael’s Tachisme. Taken together with his lifelong love of Cezanne and Matisse in particular Vaughan arrived at an entirely distinctive and personal synthesis that is still intensely English in its poetic sensitivity to a sense of place , or ‘genius loci.’