Tormented talent

We know a great deal about Keith Vaughan both as a painter and as a man, from the journals he kept between 1939 until his death in 1977. They have been described as ‘one of the greatest pieces of confessional writing of the 20th century’, and provide a fascinating record of an artist’s thoughts and working habits, and of the technical and philosophical problems facing a painter (particularly a figurative painter, and more particularly a homosexual figurative painter whose primary subject was the male nude, individually and in groups) in the 1950s and ’60s.

He was ‘a stoic puritan by nature’, consumed by self-doubt in all fields (despite a highly successful career) and by what he described as ‘a constant preoccupation with sex’ as well as by the tribulations and frustrations of a dismally unsatisfactory love-life. Together with much else he recorded the details of his sexual encounters, his sado-masochistic erotic fantasies, and his addiction to long hours of pleasure with a contraption he rigged up to deliver electric shocks to his genitals, all with meticulous, quasi-scientific detachment.