Footnotes

Provenance
With Marlborough Fine Art, London
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Marlborough New London Gallery, Keith Vaughan: New Paintings, December 1968, cat.no.23

Literature
Anthony Hepworth and Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan, The Mature Oils 1946-1977, Sansom & Company, Bristol, 2012, p.169, cat.no.AH486

In 1964 Vaughan and his partner bought a derelict row of cottages on Harrow Hill Lane, just outside the village of Toppesfield, in Essex. He spent a year renovating the building where he created a studio and spent his weekends.

'Having nowhere nearby to swim, Vaughan and Ramsay cleared a patch of land at the far end of the garden in which to excavate a waterhole. However, after spending a couple of summers splashing around in the muddy newt pond they decided to engage a local farmer to prepare the land. He unearthed a substantial area, large enough to sink in a sizeable swimming pool. This was lined with bricks and larger stone slabs that formed a series of shallow steps leading gently down into the water. Railway sleepers, implanted into a shallow embankment at the far end, helped create a more natural setting. From this spot it was possible to dive into the deeper water. The edges of the pool were lined with stones and colourful wild flowers. Within a comparatively short space of time Vaughan transformed what had been a wasteland into an extraordinary garden paradise which he referred to as 'the Essex Eden.' (Gerard Hastings, Paradise Found and Lost: Keith Vaughan in Essex, Pagham Press, 2016).

At first sight The Embankment with Figure appears to be an abstract painting, but on closer inspection we notice a figure at the lower right and interpret the upper passages of blue pigment as the sky. The accumulation of umbers and ochres represent the sloping embankment, an enclosing thicket and autumnal foliage. This section of Vaughan's garden provided the inspiration for dozens of works including The Embankment I & II and Harrow Hill – The Embankment also painted in 1968.

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for compiling this catalogue entry and to Anthony Hepworth for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. Gerard Hasting's new book on Keith Vaughan's graphic art will be published at the end of the year by Pagham Press in association with the Keith Vaughan Society.