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Laura Knight (1877 - 1970)
Laura Knight
(1877 - 1970) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Laura Knight |
| Gender: |
Female |
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| Birth: |
1877 |
| Death: |
1970 |
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Quick Facts
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Biography
In her autobiography Oil Paint and Grease Paint (London and New York 1936), Laura Knight attributed her later success to a formative influence: 'One of the greatest moments of Mother's life came when she found that I. a mere baby, was never so content as with pencil and paper; even before I could speak or walk 1 drew. There was no question of my purpose in life. I remember her saying when I was only a few years old, "You will be elected to the Royal Academy one day".'
At Nottingham School of Art, where she trained from 1891-7 she met her husband, Harold Knight. Knight wrote about the restrictions placed upon women students and described having to work in the Antique Room while the men studied from the life, and being criticised for producing work that was 'strong, like a man's'. With Harold Knight, she went first to Staithes, in North Yorkshire, and then, in 1907, to Newiyn, Cornwall, where the group of artists centered on the school of Stanhope Forbes included Dod Shaw, and her future husband Ernest Procter.
Staithes had inspired muted, realist works, but in Cornwall Knight produced landscapes full of shimmering light. She began to paint Spring during the First World War, when, for reasons of security, representing the landscape near the coast was forbidden, and so she had to memories small parts of what she saw outside - a bunch of twigs, the color of a field - and to build her painting from these mental notes in the studio. During a time of darkness and death, Knight depicted the English countryside as bright and burgeoning, full of the promise of future life. The artist Ella Naper, who stands at the centre of Spring, appears as the model Knight is painting in a self-portrait of 1913 now in the National Portrait Gallery. Ella stands naked, while Knight looks on, in her bohemian hat and neck-scarf. Knight's self image was important to her. In a series of photographs by the celebrity photographer Bassano she adopts a variety of guises, smoking a cigarette in an embroidered 'peasant' blouse, and resplendent in a sequined evening gown. Knight appears in her neck scarf and hat in a photograph illustrating a Tatler article of 1927. "The Latest Woman A.R.A. and her Work', reporting her election as an Associate of the Royal Academy, She was only the second woman to be given this accolade since the eighteenth century (Annie Swynnerton being the first). And when Knight was made a full Academician nine years later, she was the first woman to achieve this status since Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffmann. In 1932 Knight became president of the Society of Women Artists, remaining in office for the next thirty-five years.
Knight began to make images of the ballet, theatre and circus during the 1920s and 1930s. In The Modernity of English Art 1914-30 (Manchester 1997). David Peters Corbett pointed out that Knight's interest centered on the women performers' preparations, subject matter which she may have chosen as a response viewpoints of modern experience, and that these images make visible the relationship between public and private experience, and public and private languages and understandings'. The difference between reality, with all its rough edges, and the spectacle of femininity, is also alluded to in the contrast between Knight's subject matter and her chosen technique. She depicted women involved in the elaborate process of creating an appearance, yet her paintings are polished rather than sketchy, giving her 'unfinished' women performers a weighty presence. The solidity of form in Knight's work is likely to owe something to her knowledge of Procter's art,
At the invitation of Lydia Lopokova, star of the Russian Ballet, Knight pursued her fascination with backstage life. She recalled her arrangement with the ballerina: 'Her room should be my studio, she should never stay in any position on my account, she should go on with her make-up and dressing, stand in front of the long glass and go through positions and steps. We were both workers. There was to be no conversation.'411 She also portrayed Anna Pavlova and Tamara Karsavina. In 1923 Knight began to make prints. The aquatint Three Graces of the Ballet (1926} reinterprets the classical composition, with one dancer adjusting her wrinkled tights, another applying her powder and a third half-clad in a ballet skirt. Knight toured with Carmo's circus and worked at Olympia with Bertram Mills's circus in the 1920s and 1930s. In her painting of three jugglers. The Balagher Girls, women take the three graces' pose again, wearing cheap blond wigs and heavy stage make-up and standing in front of the big top. Knight's interest in the travelling life developed into a series of paintings of Romany people, including The Gypsy (Tate) Knight's t>,unlinks of v. n appear str:> Pearl, a portrait of two black American women, reproduced in the Graphic in 1928, has a backdrop of skyscrapers. A painting of a female saxophone player was shown at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC in 1928, and Miss Ealand, exhibited at the Royal Academy in the same year, depicts the sitter in a jacket and tie, with cropped hair, holding a gun. Commissioned to paint women involved in the war effort by the War Artists' Advisory Committee, Knight painted Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring (1943), showing the young woman who had mastered one of the most complex machining jobs at the Royal Ordnance factory. Knight also made portraits of military medalists, including Corporal Pearson of the WAAF, winner of the George Cross, whom she portrayed in 1940 against a tangle of barbed wire. In 1946 she went to Nuremberg to paint the trial of Nazi war criminals. For Knight, absorbing work was a woman's right, and the subject of much of her art. |
Samples of Work
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