Dame Laura Knight ( Johnson; 4 August 1877 – 7 July 1970) was an English artist who worked in oils, watercolours, etching, engraving and drypoint. Knight was a painter in the figurative, realist tradition, who embraced English Impressionism. In her long career, Knight was among the most successful and popular painters in Britain. Her success in the male-dominated British art establishment paved the way for greater status and recognition for female artists.
In 1929, she was created a Dame, and in 1936 became the first woman ever elected to full membership of the Royal Academy.The first woman associate member was Annie Swynnerton, who was elected as such in 1922, although shortly afterwards her membership status was changed to 'senior associate' when it was realised she was over the normal cut-off age for full membership, 75, at time of admission. Her large retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1965 was the first for a woman. Knight was known for painting amidst the world of the theatre and ballet in London, and for being a war artist during the Second World War. She was also greatly interested in, and inspired by, marginalised communities and individuals, including Romani people and circus performers.
Biography Early life Laura Johnson was born in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, the youngest of the three daughters of Charles and Charlotte Johnson. Her father abandoned the family not long after her birth, and Knight grew up amid financial problems. Her grandfather owned a lace-making factory but the advent of new technology led to the business going bankrupt. The family had relations in northern France who were also in the lace-making business and in 1889 Knight was sent to them with the intention that she would eventually study art at a Parisian atelier. After a miserable time in French schools, the bankruptcy of her French relations forced Knight to return to England.
Charlotte Johnson taught part-time at the Nottingham School of Art, and managed to have Knight enrolled as an "artisan student" there, paying no fees, aged just 13. At the age of 15, and still a student herself, Knight took over her mother's teaching duties when Charlotte was diagnosed with cancer and became seriously ill. Later, Laura won a scholarship and the gold medal in the national student competition held by the then South Kensington Museum. She continued to give private lessons after she left the School of Art, as both she and her sister Evangeline Agnes, known as Sissie, had been left to live alone on very little money, after the deaths of their mother, their sister Nellie and both their grandmothers. At the School of Art, Laura met one of the most promising students, Harold Knight, who was then aged 17, and determined that the best method of learning was to copy his technique. Laura and Harold became friends, and married in 1903.
Staithes and Laren In 1894, the couple visited Staithes on the Yorkshire coast, for a holiday and soon returned, accompanied by her sister Evangeline Agnes, to live and work there, becoming key members of the Staithes group of artists that was forming there. In Staithes Laura drew the people of the fishing village and the surrounding farms, showing the hardship and poverty of their lives. She made studies, paintings and watercolours, often painting in muted, shadowy tones. Lack of money for expensive materials meant she produced few oil paintings at this time. Local children would sit for her, for pennies, giving her the opportunity to develop her figure painting technique. Less successful at this time were her landscape and thematic works. Although she painted on the moors, high inland from Staithes, she did not consider herself successful at resolving these studies into finished pieces. Later she recalled:
Laura Johnson and Harold Knight married in 1903 and made their first trip to the Netherlands in 1904. They spent six weeks there that year and six months there in 1905. They visited the artists' colony at Laren. The colony was a group of followers of the Hague School of artists who had been painting in remote rural communities since the 1850s. The Knights made a third trip to Laren in 1906 before spending that winter in Yorkshire.
Cornwall In late 1907 the Knights moved to Cornwall, staying first in Newlyn, before moving to the nearby village of Lamorna. There, alongside Lamorna Birch and Alfred Munnings, they became central figures in the artists colony known as the Newlyn School. By March 1908 both had work exhibited at the Newlyn Art Gallery and Harold Knight was an established professional portrait painter, while Laura Knight was still developing her art. Around Newlyn the Knights found themselves among a group of sociable and energetic artists, which appears to have allowed the more vivid and dynamic aspects of Laura's personality to come to the fore.
Laura Knight spent the summer of 1908 working on the beaches at Newlyn making studies for her large painting of children in bright sunlight. The Beach was shown at the Royal Academy in 1909, and was considered a great success, showing Laura painting in a more Impressionist style than she had displayed previously. Around this time she began painting compositions of women in the open air, in the plein-air manner, often on the rocks or cliff-tops around Lamorna. Knight would sometimes use models from London who were prepared to pose nude. Although there was some resentment locally about this, the landowner, Colonel Paynter of Boskenna, was fully supportive and allowed Knight and the other artists a free rein. Daughters of the Sun, which showed several women, some naked, sitting by a coastal inlet was completed in 1911 and well received when shown at the Royal Academy. It is now only known from photographs but was considered to be a challenge to the then prevailing attitudes towards female nudity and aroused considerable controversy when included in a touring exhibition. The painting was badly damaged during World War I and was eventually destroyed by mould. In recent years, examples of Knight's plein-air compositions from Cornwall have attracted high prices at auction.
Another work from this time is The Green Feather, which Knight painted outdoors in a single day, and reworked due to a change in the weather, which shows the model Dolly Snell in an emerald evening dress with a hat and a large feather. Knight sent the painting to an international exhibition held at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and it was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada for £400. Knight started the vast painting Lamorna Birch and his Daughters in 1913, painting in a wood in the Lamorna Valley but then kept the painting unfinished in her studio until finally completing it in 1934, the same year Birch was elected a full member of the Royal Academy.
Self Portrait with Nude
In 1913 Knight made a painting that was a first for a woman artist, Self Portrait with Nude, showing herself painting a nude model, the artist Ella Naper. The painting is a complex, formal composition in a studio setting. Using mirrors, Knight painted herself and Naper as seen by someone entering the studio behind them both. As an art student Knight had not been permitted to directly paint nude models but, like all female art students in England at the time, was restricted to working from casts and copying existing drawings. Knight deeply resented this, and Self Portrait with Nude is a clear challenge, and reaction, to those rules.
The painting was first shown in 1913 at the Passmore Edwards Art Gallery in Newlyn, and was well received by both the local press and other artists. Although the Royal Academy rejected the painting for exhibition, it was shown at the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers in London, as The Model. The Daily Telegraphs critic called the painting "vulgar", and suggested that it "might quite appropriately have stayed in the artist's studio".
Despite this reaction, Knight continued to exhibit the painting throughout her career, and it continued to receive press criticism. After Knight's death the picture, now known simply as Self Portrait (1913), was purchased by the National Portrait Gallery, and is now considered both a key work in the story of female self-portraiture and as symbolic of wider female emancipation. In 2015, Simon Schama described the painting as a "masterpiece" and "incomparably, her greatest work, all at once conceptually complex, heroically independent, formally ingenious and lovingly sensual."
First World War Knight worked with Ella Naper, who was experienced in enameling techniques, to produce a set of small enamel pieces featuring several ballet dancers, which were shown at the Fine Art Society in London in 1915. Wartime censorship during the First World War included restrictions on sketching and painting around the British coastline, which caused problems for Knight, particularly when painting Spring. Special painting and sketching permits available after 1915 allowed her to continue her paintings of cliff-top landscapes. These were often depicted as relaxed summer scenes but some of her works, particularly those painted after the start of World War I, of a lone woman on a clifftop staring down at a turbulent sea had a darker undertone. Spring was shown at the Royal Academy in 1916 but later reworked. Several others were completed from studies in the Knights' first London studio after they moved to the capital in 1919.
Also in 1916, Knight received a £300 commission to paint a canvas for the Canadian Government War Records office on the theme of Physical Training in a Camp, and produced a series of paintings of boxing matches at Witley in Surrey. During the war, in 1916, Harold Knight had registered as a conscientious objector and was eventually required to work as a farm labourer.
Ballet Between 1911 until 1929, Knight drew and painted backstage, some of the most famous ballet dancers of the day from Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Her subjects included Lydia Lopokova, Anna Pavlova and the dance teacher Enrico Cecchetti. Knight also painted backstage, and in the dressing rooms, at several Birmingham Repertory Theatre productions. In 1924 she was commissioned to design the costumes for the ballet Les Roses.
Etching In the early 1920s, Knight bought Sir George Clausen's printing press and began etching. She produced 90 prints between 1923 and 1925, including a poster advertising tram travel to Twickenham for London Transport. Knight continued to produce posters for London Transport throughout her career, including one on circus clowns in 1932 and Winter Walks in 1957.
In 1922, Knight made her first trip to the United States, where she served on the jury at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Pictures.
Baltimore 1926