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In Landscape with Seated Figure the subject’s head has been obscured with a red cross – perhaps a reference to the self-censorship that the artist Keith Vaughan was forced to enact within his own life. His journal entries at this time reveal his anger and struggle with the injustices of being a gay man living at a time when same sex relationships between men were still criminalised. Vaughan is now well-known for his paintings of the male nude that sit between the abstract and figurative – a powerful updating or queering the heteronormative subject of the bather in western art.