This important painting has a subject matter, composition and an economy of form that recalls Cézanne's card players, but it adds to their introspection a greater engagement between the figures. Not only are the men close to one another but their outstretched arms appear to become one. The result is to emphasise touch as well as sight as is suggested, too, by the tactile nature of the simple table, the nacreous texture of which recall Ben Nicholson's dry, incised surfaces.

In the years prior to this painting Vaughan had worked mainly on paper, inspired by the landscapes of Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland, but by 1948 the artist was pursuing paintings such as The Ice Cream of a new ambition, that built from his ever-increasing understanding of Cézanne, Cubism and Matisse. Patrick Heron has drawn attention to just this aspect of Vaughan's paintings in an essay on the artist published in The Changing Forms of Art (1955), in which he singled out for particular attention Vaughan's paintings of seated figures of the later 1940s:

`Matisse's influence shows in the drawing of the figures, in the way in which the thick but sophisticated outlines relate to the colour which they enclose, and in the general functioning of that colour. Vaughan is not using colour in a Cubist manner here... He is not using colour to create a plane so much as to fill in a plane... Vaughan is also aware of the value of each colour for its on sake - or rather for the ... 'poetry of colour' ... in the intrinsic poetic evocativeness which different colours possess... His harmonies in greys, olives, rust reds, pale blues, khaki and walnut browns, blacks and sharp apple greens have their own special character...'

'Vaughan's grip on plastic values is very impressive. At the same time his paintings are suffused by a wistful, Northern lyricism: poetry and design are one.' Patrick Heron, 'Keith Vaughan', in The Changing Forms of Art, London, 1955