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| Keith Vaughan Figure throwing at a Wave 1950 gouache on paper Ingram Collection, London |
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| Keith Vaughan Blue Bathers 1952 chalk and gouache on paper private collection |
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| Keith Vaughan Green Bathers 1952 oil on canvas Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester |
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| Keith Vaughan Rose Bathers ca. 1952 gouache on card private collection |
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| Keith Vaughan Figure and Trees III ca. 1952 ink and gouache on paper private collection |
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| 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)
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| Keith Vaughan Water, Trees and Figures II ca. 1948-59 oil on canvas British Council Collection, London |
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| Keith Vaughan Landscape with Two Bathers (The Diver) 1954 oil on panel National Galleries of Scotland |
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| Keith Vaughan Bathers at Collioure 1958 oil on panel private collection |
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| Keith Vaughan Landscape with Figure 1958 oil on canvas University of York |
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| Keith Vaughan Landscape with Figure: Morelos 1959 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Keith Vaughan The Bather 1960 oil on canvas Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria |
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| Keith Vaughan Red Landscape with Figures 1964 oil on canvas Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums (Scotland) |
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| Keith Vaughan Bathers by a Green Bank 1972 oil on cardboard Government Art Collection, London |