NUDE STUDY 1951, OIL ON BOARD 40.7 X 36.8 CM
PRIVATE COLLECTION LONDON

Vaughan was conflicted about his sexuality, but felt he had to be true to it. He wrote,'Sex has been paramount in my life and my biography must necessarily appear obsessed with the subject because it has been and still is an obsession with me' (Yorke, 1990: p17). He spent his life asking: How did it come about that I am homosexual? Where do my desires generate from? How does it affect my life? Vaughan and the painter John Minton shared a London flat until Vaughan's success as a painter allowed him to take a lease on his own apartment (1952). By this time Vaughan's work was held in considerable esteem. The writer Christopher Isherwood gave a work by Vaughan to E. M. Foster (1952), bringing him a wider audience. His painting developed from illustrative landscapes to complex compositions of men bathing, fishing or in ambiguous sexual situations. Vaughan taught at Iowa State University (1959), and exposure to the open countryside made his landscapes more abstract.