Iowa Farm II

Vaughan painted two landscapes entitled Iowa Farm, both the same size and worked in oil on board. In 1959, he was appointed Painter in Residence at Iowa State University, where he worked for six months and gained much-needed stimulation from colleagues and students. During this period, he produced a series of landscapes in both oils and gouaches, each marked by a heightened sense of formal structure and design. The optimism he encountered in American painting fostered a new expressive eloquence in his handling of pigment, encouraging him to move beyond the restraint that had characterised much of his earlier work.

In Iowa Farm II, Vaughan achieves a precise balance between the figurative and the abstract. The composition grows from observed motifs (barn doors, tree boughs, gable ends, distant foliage and foreground fields), yet these are not described directly. Instead, they are distilled into structural blocks and interlocking planes, translating the features of the countryside into a rigorous formal language. Pastoral details become the scaffolding for an exploration of rhythm, balance and spatial tension, revealing Vaughan’s ability to reconcile observed reality with modernist formal concerns.

We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings for preparing this catalogue entry.