Signed and dated l.r.: Keith Vaughan/65 and inscribed by the artist (verso) Two Figures (Cain and Abel)

Gouache with ink and watercolour, 47.5 by 44 cm (18 ¾ by 17 ¼ ins)

Provenance: the artist to Marlborough Fine Art from whom probably acquired by the family of the present owners

Exhibited: Marlborough Fine Art, Keith Vaughan, Recent Gouaches, 1965, October 1965, no.48

The gouaches that Vaughan produced in 1965 are considered amongst his finest in the medium – with some sixty completed by June of that year. Many (including the present work) were submitted to his landmark (if ultimately unsuccessful) Marlborough Fine Art show in October 1965. Gerard Hastings has written “He considered this to be his golden period in representing the figure simultaneously in figurative and abstract terms”, whilst Vaughan himself observed in 1968 in an unpublished manuscript Notes on Art that he had aimed to …”render the human presence as something very real and very abstract, creating an image without identity of gender or number, which is unmistakably human - the human figure as an abstract element, like a musical chord.”