Impressionist and Modern Art

We are grateful to Mr. Gerard Hastings, who is currently working on his new book Keith Vaughan: The Graphic Art, to be published by Pagham Press, for assisting with the present catalogue entry.

Provenance:

The Redfern Gallery, London, United Kingdom.

Acquired directly from the above, March 23, 1974.

Michael Bestall, Esq.

Alan Wheatley Art, London, United Kingdom.

Acquired directly from the above.

Private Collection, United Kingdom.

Bonhams, London, sale of November 22, 2022, lot 73.

Acquired directly from the above sale by the present owner.

Exhibited:

"British Drawings 1939-49," Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, June 1969 (catalogue untraced).

Lot Essay:

In 1942, while stationed with the Pioneer Corps in Wiltshire, Keith Vaughan and his company were tasked with clearing the overgrown grounds of Greenways Preparatory School at Ashton Gifford House, a three-story Neo-Classical building in a hamlet of Codford. What seemed at first a monotonous military duty soon proved to be a profound source of artistic inspiration for Vaughan, leading to some of his most important wartime works, including The Working Party (1942), Tree Felling at Ashton Gifford (1942–43), and the present work, The Garden at Ashton Gifford (1944).

The work at Ashton Gifford revealed a striking balance between the physical demands of military labor. At times exhausting, it proved monotonous during others, thus allowing moments of quiet observation and creative energy. For Vaughan, such manual work became a study in rhythm and form. Soldiers, often assisted by local residents and schoolchildren, felled trees and dragged branches by hand, scenes that inspired the artist to capture the setting, as he wrote to his friend Norman Towne, “in lassoes of line and nets of color,” recording “white and ochre branches plunging into the oceanic surging of tangled nettles.”

Most of the works Vaughan produced at the time were rapid pen-and-ink or pencil sketches, reflecting his growing fascination with structure, gesture, and movement. In the late 1960s, he revisited several of these wartime studies, reworking them in gouache and wax pastel to soften the dense pen lines and bring new vitality to the compositions. Although early and colored, the present work already exemplifies this synthesis: the detailed figures in the foreground, rendered in ink, contrast with the pale, textured washes and touches of green pastel in the background, creating a measured balance between Vaughan’s Neo-Romantic expressiveness of the 1940s and the more restrained abstraction characteristic of his later style.