Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) - Peopled Landscapes

Keith Vaughan
Figure throwing at a Wave
1950
gouache on paper
Ingram Collection, London

Keith Vaughan
Blue Bathers
1952
chalk and gouache on paper
private collection

Keith Vaughan
Green Bathers
1952
oil on canvas
Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester

Keith Vaughan
Rose Bathers
ca. 1952
gouache on card
private collection

Keith Vaughan
Figure and Trees III
ca. 1952
ink and gouache on paper
private collection

Keith Vaughan
Foreshore with Bather
1958
oil on panel
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (England)

The Death of Antinoüs

When the beautiful young man drowned –
accidentally, swimming at dawn
in a current too swift for him,
or obedient to some cult
of total immersion that promised
the bather would come up divine,

mortality rinsed from him –
Hadrian placed his image everywhere,
a marble Antinoüs staring across
the public squares where a few dogs
always scuffled, planted
in every squalid little crossroads

at the furthest corners of the Empire.
What do we want in any body
but the world? And if the lover's
inimitable form was nowhere,
then he would find it everywhere,
though the boy became simply more dead

as the sculptors embodied him.
Wherever Hadrian might travel,
the beloved figure would be there
first: the turn of his shoulders,
the exact marble nipples,
the drowned face not really lost

to the Nile – which has no appetite,
merely takes in anything
without judgment or expectation –
but lost into its own multiplication,
an artifice rubbed with oils and acid
so that the skin might shine.

Which of these did I love?
Here is his hair, here his hair
again. Here the chiseled liquid waist
I hold because I cannot hold it.
If only one of you, he might have said
to any of the thousand marble boys anywhere,

would speak. Or the statues might have been enough,
the drowned boy blurred as much by memory
as by water, molded toward an essential,
remote ideal. Longing, of course,
become its own object, the way
that desire can make anything into a god.

– Mark Doty (1990)

Keith Vaughan
Water, Trees and Figures II
ca. 1948-59
oil on canvas
British Council Collection, London

Keith Vaughan
Landscape with Two Bathers (The Diver)
1954
oil on panel
National Galleries of Scotland

Keith Vaughan
Bathers at Collioure
1958
oil on panel
private collection

Keith Vaughan
Landscape with Figure
1958
oil on canvas
University of York

Keith Vaughan
Landscape with Figure: Morelos
1959
oil on canvas
private collection

Keith Vaughan
The Bather
1960
oil on canvas
Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria

Keith Vaughan
Red Landscape with Figures
1964
oil on canvas
Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums (Scotland)

Keith Vaughan
Bathers by a Green Bank
1972
oil on cardboard
Government Art Collection, London