Sick Parade

While serving in the Non Combatant Corps in Yorkshire during the war, Vaughan produced a series of detailed pen and ink images such as this. They describe the everyday activities that he and his comrades engaged in such as receiving post, working on fatigues, daily life in the mess, meal times and, here, queuing to see the camp doctor. A barrack mate recalled ‘He was always at work in the evenings by candlelight or lamplight, lying on his straw paillasse, his back propped up by a pile of blankets’ (Cosmo Rodewald, Letter to Gerard Hastings, May 1980).

Due to army restrictions and general rationing, studio work and oil painting on canvas was impossible. Moreover art materials were sometimes difficult to come by and Vaughan was reduced to filling small-scale notebooks with pen and ink drawings, pencil sketches with the occasional use of wax resist. Very often he covered whole pages with densely worked images, never wanting to waste a precious sheet of paper. The hatchings and cross hatchings he uses here are typical of his fastidious approach and technique in his war drawings.

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings, whose new book Awkward Artefacts: The ‘Erotic Fantasies’ of Keith Vaughan is published by Pagham Press in association with the Keith Vaughan Society, for preparing this catalogue entry.