KEITH VAUGHAN (BRITISH, 1912-1977)
The Wall at Ashton Gifford VII
signed 'Keith Vaughan' (lower right)
gouache, pen & ink
25 x 33.5 cm. (9 7/8 x 13 1/4 in.)
Executed in 1942

Provenance
Sale; Cheffins, Cambridge, 12 May 2016, lot 374
With Osborne Samuel, London, 2020, where purchased by the present owner

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

Vaughan was stationed at Codford in Wiltshire in the summer of 1942 near Ashton Gifford House, where Greenways Preparatory School had been evacuated from nearby Bognor Regis. His company was given the task of clearing the grounds. The romantic, overgrown setting inspired several paintings over the course of the next few years, including The Working Party (1942), Tree Felling at Ashton Gifford (1942–43) and The Garden at Ashton Gifford (1944) and a group of at least eight others, to which the present work belongs.

The woodland not only offered the soldiers worthwhile community service but also provided much needed fuel for the army in the form of wood. Dozens of trees had to be felled and cut into regulation-sized logs with handsaws. It was backbreaking employment and, while No. 9 Company spent the hot summer months sweating at their labours, Vaughan took the opportunity to made dozens of drawings, usually in pen and ink. He filled several sketchbooks with rapidly executed figure studies and related material. Army life precluded large-scale oil painting or studio work and so Vaughan carried around his basic materials in his knapsack. He found considerable aesthetic qualities in his surroundings, enough to write about to his friend, the painter Norman Towne:

…white and ochre branches plunging down into the oceanic surging of tangled nettles. People walking through the waist-high grass, through the aqueous leaf-green shadow, arms full of dead wood…and the wall running as an indefatigable horizontal, losing and finding itself in the jungle of weed and ivy…I wanted to capture this in lassoes of line and nets of colour, but it’s more difficult than writing about it. (Keith Vaughan, Letter to Norman Towne, October 12, 1942).

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