Nude against a green background

David Thompson (Exhibition catalogue, Keith Vaughan Retrospective, London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1962, p. 17) comments, 'Keith Vaughan's painting is about the human figure in, usually, an outdoor environment (more specifically, the male nude in landscape), and about the reconciliation within the artist himself of classical and romantic impulses in the exploration of this one theme. It has never been anything else. Even his 'pure' landscapes have a way of looking like studies for the main theme, waiting for the figure to be put back in the foreground. They are never peopled with subsidiary or incidental figures. They are either conspicuously bare of human interest, pictorial examinations of a depopulated 'setting', or else the figure is dominant. The figures themselves, on the other hand, are so much more the artist's central concern that they can often - particularly in the paintings of the last two or three years - virtually do without an 'environment' altogether'.