£5,000 to buy art – sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? It is certainly a decent chunk of change to play with – large enough to focus the mind and to open the possibility of buying something a little bit more special than a decorative wall filler. Conversely, the moment one starts looking at works in a slightly higher price bracket, and by artists who have more pedigree, suddenly £5,000 doesn’t seem that much at all! A strategy is, therefore, needed if the canny buyer is to maximise their buying power.
For me, if I had £5,000 to spend on one artwork, I would adopt a twofold approach – firstly I would look to buy as good a work on paper as I could find by an artist whose work I loved, but whose paintings are out of my reach. Secondly, in order to maximise my buying power, I would concentrate my search entirely on the auction market rather than buying from a retail gallery. Buying from auction can take a little more time, and it needs a little more research by the collector, but it often allows one to buy works considerably cheaper than retail level. As a famous supermarket says – every little helps!
The artist I would buy with my £5,000 is an artist who I think is significantly undervalued in the current market, both in terms of his talent as well as in comparison to the values many of his contemporaries achieve. Keith Vaughan is a relatively overlooked Modern British artist who was born in 1912 at Selsey Bill in Sussex. He was a self-taught artist with no formal instruction in art, yet he went onto forge a highly individualist and distinctive career which has until fairly recently has been overshadowed by the giants of his generation – Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, Ivan Hitchens etc.
Vaughan started his career as a commercial artist when he was apprenticed at the Lintas advertising agency, from which he gained an understanding of composition and form – both essential skills in commercial art. From 1939, after he left Lintas, Vaughan became a full-time artist. With the outbreak of World War II, Vaughan declared himself a conscientious objector and joined the St John Ambulance; in 1941 he was conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps.
During the war Vaughan formed friendships with the painters Graham Sutherland and John Minton, with whom after demobilisation in 1946 he shared premises. Through these contacts he formed part of the neo-romantic circle of the immediate post-war period. However, Vaughan rapidly developed an idiosyncratic style which moved him away from the Neo-Romantics. Concentrating on studies of male figures, his works became increasingly abstract.
Vaughan worked as an art teacher at the Camberwell College of Arts, the Central School of Art and later at the Slade School.
Throughout his life, Vaughan’s struggled with his own internal demons. Keith Vaughan was a gay man living in a time when homosexuality was illegal and actively frowned upon by Society. His struggle with his sexuality is reflected throughout his work and in his source of subject matter. Studies of figures and male nudes feature heavily in his work, although they are simplified and abstracted showing the influence of both international Modernism, Cubism his love of ballet and dance. Vaughan suffered from habitual depression and alcoholism, which eventually resulted in his suicide in 1977.
One might be forgiven for thinking that in light of all this Vaughan’s work would be negative and dour, however, this is wrong. As is often the case, personal struggles can produce works of great sensitivity and subtly. Vaughan’s work has a graphic quality that is softened by the use of a very sophisticated colour palette. They are very beautiful, elegant images.
The commercial art market has begun to reflect the increasing interest in, and appreciation of Vaughan’s work, with good examples now regularly achieving six figure sums at the auction. His works are also appearing more frequently at high end art fairs, where wall space has a commercial value, and a dealer’s decision to show a Vaughan instead of another artist is a calculated strategy, and one that reflects growing demand.
And yet, even with this increased visibility Keith Vaughan’s work is still undervalued in relation to many of his contemporaries, and it represents significant investment potential. His drawings in particular are surprisingly accessible financially and it is entirely possible to buy lovely pencil or pen and ink studies for a thousand or two, sometimes less; and more important, finished watercolours and gouaches can be bought within our £5,000 budget at auction.
How long this relative accessibility will last, I cannot say, but in my opinion now is definitely the time to buy Keith Vaughan’s work if like it and respond to it. Clearly, as always, liking an artist’s work is the primary reason for buying it, but it’s always nice to have a healthy upside too.
Born in the village of Holloway on 12 May, 1812, he was the twentieth child in a family of twenty-one children. His devoted older sister, Ann, brought him up in a separate home from his countless siblings. Suffering from epilepsy, chronic asthma and weak eyesight, his education was mostly at her hands. His father, a stockbroker of Danish background, had understandable money troubles. Fortunately, Lear’s natural ability as an artist and draughtsman enabled him to earn a living from the age of sixteen, and ultimately win the wholesale admiration of society. Between July and August 1846 he visited Queen Victoria at Osborne House in order to teach her ‘landscape painting in watercolours’. But he was also faced with the difficulties of being a homosexual in the morally censorious climate of mid-19th-century England. While he was to find living abroad easier, he was always a lonely man and this comes across in the sad, forlorn quality of his nonsense poems.
The pick of the bunch were definitely at Christie’s where the evening sale made £45M as opposed to Sotheby’s comparatively paltry £17.2M. In fact, the tiny pen and ink study of the Head of a Bear by Leonardo da Vinci, which sold at Christies for £8.857M made half the whole of the Sotheby’s evening sale on it’s own. My stand-out lots at Christie’s were first the exquisite Music Lesson by Frans van Mieris, on panel made out from a small arched-top painting to a larger rectangle by the artist himself, which, at £3.5M indicated that no-one was put off by the alteration to its shape. Second was the magnificent large View of Verona by Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto’s nephew, which took £10.575M. My third choice was the very rare canvas of Saint Andrew by the French follower of Caravaggio, Georges de la Tour. 
This made a very respectable £4M. I don’t know how many paintings by this rare master are still in private hands, but it will be a tiny number. The only disappointment to my mind was the beautiful Lawrence portrait of Richard Meade, which sold for £598K, within the estimate but not a true reflection of its worth.
