Welsh Industrial Landscape

It is often forgotten that Vaughan was as much a painter of landscapes as of the figure (for example, nearly half of his catalogued oil paintings are landscapes), and this fine example of a mixed media industrial landscape demonstrates his early manner very well. Still under the influence of Sutherland at this time, Vaughan nevertheless took control of his subject and made it his own. He analysed Sutherland’s effect on his generation in his essay A View of English Painting, published in New Writing and Daylight, 1944. ‘What Picasso did to the human figure Graham Sutherland is doing to the English landscape. I think he is the first painter to relate the full discoveries of the 20th century in France to the English Romantic tradition.’ He went on to describe Sutherland’s theory of ‘non-scenic’ landscape. ‘Sutherland has dispensed with the horizon, with the panoramic conception of landscape, which in the hands of Turner and the Impressionists reaches the highest point in the attempt at direct expression of infinity. Landscape painting has returned to its origins; to the conception of nature as substance and weight and growth.’ Here we see this gospel in action.

A.L.