Potato Peeling

The constraints of army life limited Vaughan mainly to drawings in pencil, ink and gouache in small sketchbooks, using material easily carried in his haversack. These wartime drawings included quite elaborate landscape-based gouaches, worked up in the evenings from quick sketches made from nature during the day. He also made many direct on-the-spot drawings depicting his companions following their routine lives, eating, playing cards, dressing, sleeping, showering, writing letters, reading and so on. The present work is a fine example of these army drawings, bigger and more elaborate than many, with its sensitive lines beautifully capturing the intimacy of these three young soldiers, absorbed as comrades in this most mundane task. It perhaps suggests an almost mystical apotheosis of the ordinary.

J.B.