Footnotes

PROVENANCE:
Acquired by the present owner prior to 1962

EXHIBITED:
London, Matthiesen Gallery, Keith Vaughan; Recent Paintings, 25 February-19 March 1960, cat.no.25
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Keith Vaughan; Retrospective, March-April 1962, cat.no.226 (where lent by the present owner)

LITERATURE:
Anthony Hepworth & Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946-1977; Commentary and Comprehensive Catalogue, Sansom & Company Ltd., Bristol, 2012, p.114, cat.no.AH287 (ill.b&w)

At the beginning of 1959 Vaughan went to Iowa State University to work there as painter in residence. That spring he hired a car and explored the surrounding landscape, always on the look-out for new subjects:

Drove all day up the West Mississippi basin. High plateau country, rolling hills, farms, limestone cliffs, space & sun.... Red oxide barns, white farmhouses, purple black soil layered with streaks of pale blue snow, rolling grass and corn stubble. Nothing over a 100 years old. Fine craftsmanship of most buildings. Wooden churches made by carpenters not architects. (Keith Vaughan, Journal, April 4 1959).

On these field-trips he took with him pencils and sketchbooks making visual notations as he went. The resulting drawings were worked up later into paintings when he returned to his studio.

Vaughan was particularly attracted to agricultural landscapes, farms with formal, plotted fields and rolling meadowlands dotted with barns or punctuated by repeated fence-posts. He felt able to translate these formalised, geometric shapes into pictorial statements and incorporate them into the compositions of his paintings. In 1959 he produced no fewer than five canvases depicting such rural subjects, (see also Farm at Cedar Rapids, Iowa Farm I and II, and Farm at Roding).

In Abandoned Farm we find some of Vaughan's recurrent abstract motifs: a slanting gable end of a farmhouse, a rectangular barn door and angular patches of grass, laid down in articulated blocks and slabs. His use of colour is as economical as it is harmonious and the variations of related sap and olive greens evoke the mood of early springtime.

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for compiling this catalogue entry. His book, Keith Vaughan: The Photographs, has recently been published by Pagham Press.