1940s painter Keith Vaughan is a hit at 20/21 British art fair The best-selling artist at the recent 20/21 British art fair was not Damien Hirst (Tate Modern's big draw) or Mary Fedden (a popular favourite), but the lesser known, neo-Romantic painter of the 1940s Keith Vaughan. At least four different galleries sold his work, sometimes two or three examples at a time. These ranged from figure drawings and landscapes priced from £1,200 upwards at the Belgrave Gallery to small oil paintings such as Village at Sunrise (pictured) sold by Agnew's for £45,000 (illustrated). Larger paintings have sold for much more at auction, but it was the number of dealer sales that was impressive. Bath dealer Anthony Hepworth, who recently published a catalogue raisonné of Vaughan's work, says the high level of interest can be partly attributed to the greater degree of awareness created by the centenary of Vaughan's birth this year. A major exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester has been accompanied by solo exhibitions at Agnew's and at Hepworth's gallery, and will be followed by an exhibition and new book on the artist to be launched in November by the Osborne Samuel gallery in Mayfair. Vaughan committed suicide in 1977 at the age of 65. In his last journal entry he wrote of his life: "It wasn't a complete failure. I did some..." and tails off into oblivion. The dealers are now filling in the dots. Artist Joy Barnes, who will be 100 next month, was at her local auctioneers, Greenslade Taylor Hunt in Somerset, last week to witness the almost complete sell-out of her art collection for £869,300, four times the amount expected. Contemporary ceramics by Hans Coper, Lucie Rie and Edmund de Waal all sold for multiple times their estimates, but it was the modern sculptures by Elizabeth Frink, Paul Mount, Reg Butler and Barbara Hepworth that fetched the most. Top lot was a small pierced oval alabaster carving by Hepworth made in 1963, but reminiscent of her early work inspired by the pebbles she found on the Norfolk beach she visited with Henry Moore in the 1930s. Estimated at £50,000, it sold to London dealer Richard Green for £393,200. The smile on the auctioneer's face as he rounded up what was a record sale for the auctioneers was matched only by the one that Barnes still wore as she made her way back to her nursing home. An early religious painting by Goya of Lot and his daughters that was discovered by Koller Auctions in Zurich went under the hammer last week. Such early, religious works are rare and unfamiliar, even to scholars. "If that's a Goya, then I'm a monkey," wrote one Telegraph reader on the website when the sale was announced. But it sold to a private Dutch collector for £1.76 million, three times the estimate and a record for an early Goya. An exhibition of Goya's religious work is being planned by the Dulwich Picture Gallery in collaboration with the British Museum.