John Keith Vaughan was born at Selsey Bill in Sussex on 23 August 1912. His family moved to London shortly after his birth. Although Vaughan had no formal art training, he gained a good grounding in Italian Renaissance art while at Christ’s Hospital School, then worked in the Lintas advertising agency, then owned by Unilever, from 1931-39, painting in his spare time. Upon the outbreak of the Second World War, he registered as a Conscientious Objector and joined the St John’s Ambulance Brigade, but was conscripted into the Non Combatant Corps in 1941. He used the travel opportunities to study landscape throughout Britain and was able to produce drawings and gouache paintings. His first exhibitions took place during the war. Twelve of the sketches and paintings produced in that period were purchased by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and displayed at the National Gallery in London, alongside works by artists such as Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, and John Piper, whom Vaughan greatly admired. In 1942 Vaughan was stationed at Ashton Gifford near Codford in Wiltshire. Paintings from this time include The Wall at Ashton Gifford, now owned by the Manchester Art Gallery. His fluent German then stood him in good stead as a prisoner-of-war interpreter in Yorkshire. His drawings of army life, however, such as Breakfast in the Marquee (1942), attracted attention and he entered the circle of the publisher Peter Watson in London. Vaughan also established friendships with the painters Graham Sutherland, John Craxton, Robert Colquhoun and John Minton, with whom after demobilisation in 1946, he shared premises. Through these contacts he formed part of the Neo-Romantic circle of the immediate post-war period. However, Vaughan rapidly developed an idiosyncratic style which moved him away from the Neo-Romantics. Concentrating on studies of male figures, his works became increasingly more abstract. Vaughan’s first one-man show of drawings was held at the Reid and Lefevre Gallery in 1942, followed by another of oil paintings in 1946. He continued to exhibit there until 1952. Success beckoned and he painted the Theseus Mural in the Festival of Britain Dome of Discovery in 1951. Vaughan taught at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in the period 1946-1948; at the Central School of Arts and Crafts 1948-57 and at the Slade from 1954. During the 1950s Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse were major influences, but most important was that of Nicolas De Stael, who enabled him to reconcile figurative and abstract elements. After 1945 Vaughan travelled in the Mediterranean, North Africa, Mexico and the USA, where he was resident artist at Iowa State University in 1959. The Tate and many other public galleries hold his work. A retrospective was held at Whitechapel Art Gallery with an Arts Council tour, in 1962 and another at the University of York in 1970. He served on the Arts Council Advisory Panel and was appointed CBE in 1965. However, behind the veneer of success lurked a man of tortured complexity. Throughout his career, Vaughan maintained a difference between the works he intended for exhibition and those he considered to be purely private. This second group, created throughout his career, consisted of several hundred pencil and pen and ink drawings all depicting young men. Deeply troubled by his sexuality, Vaughan became increasingly melancholy. He was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 1975 and committed suicide in London on 4 November 1977, at the age of 65. He recorded his last moments in his diary, as a drugs overdose took effect. After his death, there was a memorial exhibition at Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield. Vaughan’s 61 volumes of private journals reveal a man who was obsessively self-analytical about his own sexuality and his creativity, and the links between them. They afford the reader a graphic insight into his often vulnerable, obsessive and sad private life. Vaughan was above all else enthralled by the male human body, which, as Bernard Denvir observed in the catalogue of an exhibition held at Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery in 1981, ‘assumed in his work an importance it had never known before in the history of British painting.’ A good representative selection of his work may be found in the collection of the Tate in London. In 1990 Malcolm Yorke published his Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work which offered a considered appreciation of Vaughan’s life.