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“I Cannot Believe I Have Committed Suicide”
The remarkable last words of this English artist
On November 4th 1977, the English painter John Keith Vaughan killed himself with a brew of pills and whisky.
The very hour of his death can be pinpointed with striking accuracy. At 9:30 am on that winter’s morning, Vaughan opened his journal and recorded his last thoughts in writing: “The capsules have been taken with some whisky,” the artist wrote.
The journal continues until Vaughan could write no longer: “I don’t quite believe anything has happened though the bottle is empty. At the moment I feel very much alive . . . I cannot believe I have committed suicide since nothing has happened.”
He wrote a few more lines until the words tailed off into illegible squiggles.
Born in 1912 in Selsey, United Kingdom, Vaughan was one of the most gifted British painters of the last century. According to his friend and the editor of his journals, Alan Ross, Vaughan was self-contained, reserved, sharply observant and a little bit grumpy. He preferred to work rather than socialise, and recorded his “resentments, fantasies and general observations on art and life” in numerous notebooks.
Vaughan worked in advertising until World War II, when he was forced to serve despite being a…
