Keith Vaughan: Figures & Landscapes | Brooke-Walder Gallery
In the years after World War II, Keith Vaughan worked at an ad agency and painted lyrical portraits of brawny but vulnerable-looking men on the side. He was well connected and successful, with E.M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood among his collectors. Prunella Clough was a close friend.
Extracts from Vaughan’s extensive diaries provide some of the darkest moments in the recently-published Some Men in London anthologies, which cover the capital’s queer lives between the years 1945 and 1967. Their editor, Peter Parker, notes that Vaughan was such a committed diarist that he made his last entry when, “suffering from cancer, he waited to lapse into unconsciousness after taking a deliberate overdose of barbiturates”.
Parker also describes the diaries as “largely dispiriting”, which is an understatement. Vaughan’s relationships with his artist’s models blended hopelessly with his sex life, and involved various degrees of emotional and financial entanglement with younger, less-well-connected, more beautiful men. He was an unhappy predator, but a predator all the same.
“It amused me to send to H.M Inspector of Taxes yesterday a list, in duplicate, of the names & addresses of my sexual partners, past & present, with appropriate sums given to each, totalling £92 (model fees of course),” he wrote in 1965.
“There are not many people I suppose the cost of whose sexual gratification can be charged to expenses. And yet it is from the contact I make with such people, physical & visual, that the brain cells which produce the erotic images are recharged. The pity is that I cannot find more bodies to hire.”
Bodies to hire. It’s a tribute to Vaughan’s artistic skill that this chilling attitude can’t really be traced in his paintings and drawings, or at least can’t be traced in those on show currently at the Brooke-Walder gallery in London. There’s something sweetly reticent and fragile about the men on these walls.
Nude Standing, from 1953 and pictured above, is the standout work on show, and sums a lot of the others up. This hired body is in the centre of a dingy room - or a wood: Vaughan liked to depict claustrophobic interiors, and also the Hampstead ponds and heath.
His head is downcast, as if too shy to look at us. He is lit as adoringly as a Saint Sebastian. His sex hangs in semi-shadow, but is insistently delineated by the artist from the dark background, the muscular thighs.
In real life, perhaps the young model is contemplating his fee - and what he’ll have to do to earn it. As he painted, perhaps the artist was pondering his next predation, and hating himself for it. Either way, this body made it to a gallery wall in Mayfair, seven decades later. I find that, at least, to be the opposite of dispiriting.
Keith Vaughan: Figures and Landscapes is at Brooke-Walder Gallery (London). 07 - 30 May 2025