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Keith Vaughan, usually celebrated for his male nude paintings, was also a highly accomplished painter of landscapes and still life subjects. During the late 1940s and early 1950s he produced a range of gouache paintings representing both groups and single figures in sparsely furnished rooms. In each case, tables are laid out with a variety of domestic objects that seem to take on greater significance because of their proximity to the figures (see Figures in a Yellow Room, Green Interior with Figures, Figure and Still Life with Blue Cloth and Ochre Interior with Figure, each painted in 1950). In 1950 he exhibited thirty such gouaches at the Redfern Gallery, nine of which were still life paintings of jugs, cups and coffee pots accompanied by various citrus fruits, each carefully placed on coloured tablecloths (see Still Life with Coffee Pot, Tea Set and Iced Cake, Jug and Russets, Fruit and Jug on a Pink Cloth, Still Life with Greengages and Yellow Cup, Summer Drinks and Citrus Fruits and Still Life with Pink Jug, each painted in 1950). Two years later, when Durlacher Brothers in New York began to represent Vaughan in the USA, further related gouache works were exhibited in their gallery including Yellow Figure Seated. He went on to have three more exhibitions there, which explains why many of his paintings from this period are in public and private collections in the USA.

Vaughan was particularly interested in the work of certain French painters including Cézanne and Chardin, both of whom were masters of the still life genre and figures in domestic settings; their approach to harmonious colour and structured composition had a significant impact on his work.

Figuration and abstraction are simultaneously played off against one another in Yellow Figure Seated, revealing Vaughan’s growing awareness of the painted surface as an expressive element in its own right.

A single, male figure sits at his kitchen table, lost in thought. Placed in front of him are bananas, lemons and a melon. In the years following the war, when rationing continued as part of everyday life, these were comparatively luxurious commodities and still difficult to come by. The fruits have determined the general high key colour of the composition. Along with the tablecloth and figure, the forms are related through variations of the lemon yellow in a typical demonstration of Vaughan’s economical use of colour. This approach can be traced back to his wartime painting, when pigments were restricted, and he had to vary and extend his palette as best he could. He began to modulate his basic chromatic key by progressively adding white pigment to the dominant colour to achieve an assortment of lighter, but related hues. 

The composition, too, is tightly constructed out of a series of repeated arcs and curves, counterbalanced by the geometric shape of the table. To the left, the arm of the blue chair rhymes with the handle of the white jug at the right. Similarly, the youth’s ear, eyes and shoulders find compositional counterparts echoed in the related curvature of the fruits. 

Although works such as Yellow Figure Seated are referred to as ‘gouache paintings’, they are in fact created from a combination of several materials. In an unpublished studio notebook, dating from 1963, Vaughan wrote: 

My early pictures were not, of course, pure gouache. They were mixtures of wax crayon, Indian ink and gouache. And the chemical properties of these different kinds of materials to a large extent determine their own control. They react on each other in certain ways which can be exploited but can not be prevented. You might call it a volatile medium.

The vigorous use of crayon and wax resist is influenced by the work of Graham Sutherland and Henry Moore. Combining them with gouache helped Vaughan to obtain a new pictorial variety and surface richness which captured something of the stiffness of oil paint. Sutherland taught him to incorporate wax resist into his painting, demonstrating the process in the early 1940s. The technique depends on the principle that oily wax repels water-based pigments. When a diluted wash of gouache is brushed over an area previously treated with crayon, it is immediately repelled and breaks up into mottled, speckled deposits on the wax-coated surface. In Yellow Figure Seated Vaughan has achieved remarkable textural effects this way on the mouth of the jug and in the bold outlines of both the figure and the fruits. 

Figuration and abstraction are simultaneously played off against one another in Yellow Figure Seated, revealing Vaughan’s growing awareness of the painted surface as an expressive element in its own right. It was at this point in his career that he developed a distinct tension between subject matter and the value of the pigment’s application. This notion went on to become one of his central preoccupations as a painter.