Winifred Knights had a critical triumph at the age of twenty-one when The Deluge won her the first Rome Scholarship for Decorative Painting to be awarded to a woman. The Daily Graphic featured the work on its cover in February 1921 and enthused about the 'remarkable' painting, in which the ark was reminiscent of 'modern concrete buildings' and the figures were 'those of present day men and women', concluding that 'critics declare the painter a genius'. Knights portrayed her mother as the figure carrying a baby, while the woman at the front of the painting, escaping the rising water with an expression of fear, is a portrait of the artist herself.
Knights won a number of prizes and a scholarship while she was at the Slade in the late 1910s. One of her award winning works, the tempera painting Composition, Mill Hands on Strike (1919, University College London) shows a stoic group of men and women against an eerily lifeless industrial landscape. Knights used her meticulous technique to depict contemporary events, in line with some current definitions of decorative painting, as an engagement with real life filtered through knowledge of Renaissance perspective and color theory. The Deluge can be understood in the context of Knights's experience of the recent war, while the painting of striking workers portrays industrial unrest. She also undertook religious subjects, working from 1928 to 1933 on a commission to paint Scenes from the life qf St Martin of Tours for the Milner Memorial Chapel. Canterbury Cathedral.
During her lifetime Knights rarely exhibited. Her work has been shown recently in The Last Romantics-. The Romantic Tradition in British Art at the Barbican Art Gallery in 1989, and alongside that of her husband the painter W.T Monnington in Two Way Traffic. British and Italian Art i88o-ig8o at the Royal Albert Memorial Exhibition, in Exeter in 1996. A retrospective was held at the Fine Art Society and the British School at Rome in 1995. |
