PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE PETER ADAM
KEITH VAUGHAN (BRITISH, 1912-1977)
Foreshore with Three Figures
signed 'Vaughan' (lower right)
oil on board
40.6 x 43.2 cm. (16 x 17 in.)
Painted in 1963

Provenance
The artist, from whom purchased by
Peter Adam (1919-1929), thence by family descent

Exhibited
Olympia, London, Keith Vaughan, 26 Feb-3 Mar 2002, cat no. KV285

Literature
Anthony Hepworth and Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils, 1946-1977, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, p.143, cat.no.AH395

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings and Anthony Hepworth for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.

Three male nude figures bathe together in the shallow waters of a secluded cove. One of them, on the left and viewed in profile, sits on a rock watching his companions wash and dry themselves. A steep, background cliff encloses the scene at the right.

Groups of male bathers is a quintessential Vaughan subject, one which he painted throughout his career. During the early 1930s he frequented the male swimming enclosure at Highgate Ponds and, later, spent his summer weekends at Pagham Beach taking photographs and making drawings of his friend larking about on the hot shingle. In the 1970s he dug out a sizeable pool at the end of his garden in Essex and, in the summer months, invited friends to stay over and have a swim. Peter Adam brought along David Hockney, the grand master of the swimming pool genre, who spent an afternoon splashing around and sunbathing on the railway sleepers which lined the pool. Patrick Proctor and Prunella Clough were also frequent visitors. Invariably Vaughan took photographs and made drawings to inform his work.

But it was his first visit to Greece in 1960 which transformed Vaughan’s approach to painting bather subjects. From then on, the Aegean Sea was translated into expanses of blue in his oil paintings and gouaches, while his once sombre, earthy palette became infused with hot, succulent colours. A new sensuousness also appeared in his handling of pigment, supremely evident in the present work, where pigment becomes a tactile equivalent of flesh rather than a mere representation of it.

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for compiling this catalogue entry.