Keith Vaughan was a British painter best known for his muted abstractions of male nudes, landscapes, and architecture.
He meshed the technical practices of Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, and Nicolas de Staël to create a unique aesthetic expression, as exemplified in Bather (1961). Vaughan was a self-taught painter and, according to the diaries he kept, perhaps used the medium as a means to cope with the frustrations of his unfulfilled homosexual fantasies.
Vaughan worked as an art teacher at the Camberwell College of Arts, the Central School of Art and later at the Slade School.
Vaughan is also known for his journals, selections from which were published in 1966 and more extensively in 1989, after his death. A gay man troubled by his sexuality, he is known largely through those journals. He was diagnosed with cancer in 1975 and died by suicide in 1977 in London, recording his last moments in his diary as the drugs overdose took effect.
