Figures in an interior seated around a table

'The essential infrastructure of Vaughan's work came from an odd mixture of ballet, photography, and drawing from life - he used models frequently throughout the fifties and sixties. Much of his feeling for dramatically eloquent composition came from the early years, in the thirties, watching the post Diaghilev ballet and dancers in Colonel de Basil's company. He was moved by Fokine's voluptously angular and hieratic choreography for The Prodigal Son with Rouault's darkly smoldering set and costumes. As for many others of his generation, ballet provided the first direct contact with modern art. He was also imaginatively engaged by photography, not as a medium, but as a revealing source of information and record ... His journey as an artist was from figures as part of an idealized topography ... through the concept of figures enacting a myth or ritual - or a formalized domestic situation - to the idea of figures so enveloped by light and space that they melt into it, still discernible, still structured, but almost absorbed as an integral element of the light, the space and the colour' (B. Robertson, Exhibition catalogue, Keith Vaughan, London, Austin Desmond Fine Art, 1990, p. 7).