Wednesday 11 July 2012

Our other Keith

2012 is the centenary year of the painter and diarist Keith Vaughan (PeA 21-29), the most renowned visual artist yet produced by CH.

Frustratingly, this blog has come back to life too late to bang the drum for the two main exhibitions marking the centenary, both of which have already closed. Keith Vaughan: Romanticism to Abstraction was staged at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, and reviewed at length in the Independent on Sunday, the Financial Times, the The Independent, the Spectator, the Observer and the Daily Telegraph. Overlapping with it, Agnew's Gallery in London mounted a commercial exhibition of fifty of Vaughan's works, thirty-five of which are shown here.

There have also been commemorative lectures at the Olympia International Fine Art and Antiques Fair and the Royal Watercolour Society, and two new books about the man have appeared, Keith Vaughan by Philip Vann & Gerard Hastings and Drawing to a Close: The Final Journals of Keith Vaughan by Gerald Hastings. Joining them in September should be Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-1977 by Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey. Also of interest is the catalogue (again by Gerard Hastings) from last autumn's exhibition of Keith Vaughan's Gouaches, Drawings & Prints at Osborne Samuel, which can be pored over page-by-page here.

And there's at least one more exhibition to come, albeit seemingly a small one: at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, from September through December.

At the last count CH owned four works by Vaughan: three of the four large panels he painted for the school as a young man, and an extra picture acquired decades later as a memorial to reputedly the finest CH teacher of the last century, the Hon David Roberts (Horsham Staff 36-55). If the school or foundation still possesses these paintings it would be interesting to know if they have been lent out for exhibition this year, or otherwise put on show to acknowledge the centenary of this distinguished but (not least in the CH context) much neglected Old Blue.

(The title of this post alludes to the war poet Keith Douglas (LaA, MidB 31-38) whose fame has outstripped Vaughan's in recent decades.)

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