Artist 101

1.

Background & Early Life

Laura Knight (née Johnson) was born in Derbyshire in 1877, the youngest of three sisters. Her father, whom she never met, walked out soon after her birth, leaving her mother to fend for the family. Her resourceful attitude was instilled in her daughters, whom she raised to be independent and to provide for themselves by promoting their educations and nurturing their abilities.

Knight spent some time with relatives in Northern France before returning to England aged 13 to enrol at the Nottingham School of Art, where her mother was teaching part-time. During this early stage of her studies Knight already showed promise and won several awards, including a Prince of Wales scholarship. These prizes were welcomed as she was struggling financially following the untimely deaths of her mother and sister as well as of both grandmothers.

At the School she met a talented fellow art student named Harold Knight, whom she married in 1903.

2.

British Impressionism & Landscapes

In 1907 the Knights moved to the south coast of Cornwall and joined an art colony known as the Newlyn School, which gathered artists who painted en plein air, in the Impressionist style. Other notable artists in the group were Alfred Munnings, Lamorna Birch and Henry Scott Tuke.

Knight spent most of her time painting on the beaches of the area, creating some of her most identifiable seaside and landscape works, including A Seaside Holiday and Spring Landscape, which both sold at Bonhams London in recent sales. In recent years prices for Knight’s plein-air works have been fetching increasingly higher prices at auction.

In 1913 Knight finished what would become one of her most recognised masterpieces: Self Portrait with Nude, which depicted Knight herself in the act of painting her friend and artist Ella Naper in the nude. It is a complex composition and Naper in fact appears twice: posing and painted in the canvas. It’s a stunning and disconcerting work that combines a number of achievements that were revolutionary at the time: it is a self-portrait that makes a strong woman-artist statement while also being a representation a female artist painting a female nude, dispensing with the male gaze associated with centuries of painting.

3.

Painting Performers

The Knights moved to London in 1919, and soon after she was invited backstage during the third season of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. She became utterly fascinated and started drawing and painting backstage scenes of the company, which featured some of the most famous dancer of the time, including Lydia Lopokova and Anna Pavlova. A notable painting of the period is A Ballet Dancer which sold at Bonhams London in 2016 for £37,500.

In the early 1920s Knight attended the Bertram Mills Circus at London’s Olympia and was again beguiled by that carnivalesque world. She began painting and drawing the circus performers and even joined the Bertram Mills and Great Carmo circuses on a joint British tour between 1929 and 1930, during which she mastered the art of painting lively, complex scenes at great speed. Important paintings of the period include Circus Musicians and the phenomenal group scene Charivari (The Grand Parade) (1928), which sold at Bonhams London in 2019 for £62,500.

4.

War Paintings

Knight was the only woman artist to receive war commissions across the two World Wars, with these works being exhibited at the National Gallery. In 1916, during the First World War, she received a commission for the Canadian Government War Records to convey the theme of physical training in a camp. In 1939, at the start of the Second World War, she was asked to produce a recruitment poster for the Women’s Land Army.

Another important milestone came in 1946, when she became the only British artist to cover the Nuremberg Trials. She pitched herself to the War Artists' Advisory Committee. The resulting work, the large-scale painting The Nuremberg Trial was received with reservations at the time but has eventually been recognised as one of her masterpieces.

5.

Blazing a Trail

There are many achievements that make Laura Knight a total pioneer, a woman who overcame a difficult early life and triumphed in a male-dominated field. There is of course the potent woman-artist statement of her Self Portrait with Nude, which could be considered proto-feminist (let’s not forget that at the time the Royal Academy didn’t allow women to paint live nude models, having to work from casts).

But she also received hugely important endorsements by the establishment: In 1929 Knight was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 1936, she became the first woman to be elected to full membership of London’s Royal Academy (Angelica Kaufmann and Mary Moser had previously been invited to become members, but not elected in the traditional way). In that same vein, in 1965 Knight became the first woman ever to have a retrospective at the Royal Academy.

With her prolific production, tireless work ethic and passion, and resounding successes during her lifetime, Knight blazed a trail for the women artists of her time and for those to come, embodying the increasing inclusivity of art institutions and the growing interests of the public in female perspectives and art made by women.

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