Modern and Contemporary Art

Note

We gratefully acknowledge Gerard Hastings, The Keith Vaughan Society, for his assistance cataloguing this lot.

In 1941, Keith Vaughan joined the Non-Combatant Corps as a conscientious objector. He spent the winter of 1941-42 under canvas with his fellow recruits, in freezing conditions. The following year he moved into Nissen huts. His journal describes living and sleeping in cramped conditions in bell tents with the rest of No. 9 Company. The orderlies were charged with waking up the company at the crack of dawn and keeping watch at night. In the present drawing, two of them read by candlelight, their only source of light in the tents. A makeshift table and a knapsack can be seen at the left.

Vaughan’s gouaches at this time represent the mundane, everyday activities of his comrades: potato peeling, digging, harvesting, and felling trees. In some ways the un-heroic nature of these activities and the subtle, understated poetic quality of them legitimized and affirmed his conscientious objections. He found a good deal of solace in the relationships he made in the army. One friend named Cosmo Rodewald remembered him cadging candle stubs from his fellow conscripts - not, as one would expect, to supply the necessary light from which to see, but to help him create his wax resist textures. He recalled ‘Keith was always at work in the evenings by candlelight or lamplight, lying on his straw paillasse, his back propped up by a pile of blankets,’ [Cosmo Rodewald, letter to Gerard Hastings, January 8, 1981]. Whenever an opportunity presented itself during a cigarette break, at lunchtime or in the evenings, Vaughan drew in the notebooks he carried in his regulation knapsack, alongside a few bottles of ink and some wax crayons. - based on information provided by Gerard Hastings, The Keith Vaughan Society.