Keith Vaughan

Keith Vaughan (1912-77) was a major figure in post-war British art who is known for his searching portraits of the male nude and his association with the Neo-Romantic painters. This book provides for the first time a definitive, illustrated account of his life and work, exploring his wide-ranging achievement as a modern British artist. Drawing on Vaughan's considerable writings, Philip Vann explores the many aspects of the artist's personal, professional and philosophical-inner life. His text interweaves art-critical and biographical exploration to reveal a figure for whom art was inseparable from the nature of its creator. He reviews Vaughan's large body of paintings, drawings and illustrations: his early Neo-Romantic paintings of male bathers and boys in semi-abstracted landscapes, his post-war illustrations of young men immersed in elegiac contemplation of the landscape, and his later gouaches and landscapes. A fascinating essay by Gerard Hastings provides a close-up examination of Vaughan's gouache technique.