One of a string of trips made abroad in the early to mid-1960s, Keith Vaughan visited Morocco in April 1965 with his friend Patrick Woodcock. Vaughan’s journals from the trip detail the usual erotically charged encounters but also include lyrical impressions of the Moroccan landscape's beauty. Detailing his impressions of the Agadir coastal road, Vaughan writes of 'marvellous dry luminous landscape, scrubby foothills, cinnamon-pink and ochre white-earth dotted with dark olives and patches of glowing saturated colours from the peasants working in the fields' (K. Vaughan, Journal and Drawings, London, 1966, p. 212). Figures in Yellow Sunset gives form to these observations through gestural, layered applications of gouache and luminous oil pastels, a medium Vaughan discovered while teaching at Iowa State University in 1959. More or less unavailable in England at the time, Vaughan pioneered their use and the present work shows the artist deploying them to their full expressive potential. Mirroring the above journal entry, the hooded figures in the foreground are integral to the landscape and its palette of colours, rather than independent from it. Rendered as a handful of rectangular forms, they blend with the colours and surfaces around them. In places they appear almost translucent, allowing the bright whites and orange tones of the landscape to shine through from beneath.