LAURA KNIGHT A WORKING LIFE

Laura Knight: A Working Life

I am thankful to have known the tasks and struggles of common life, joy and despair like any other mortal. I am just a hard-working woman, who longs to pierce the mystery of form and colour, and with full heart add a mite to the treasure of this world.1

Laura Knight and the Royal Academy

When Laura Knight was elected an Associate Royal Academician (ARA) in 1927 she was not, as some of the press reported, the first woman to be so honoured since the foundation members Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser. That accolade went to Annie Swynnerton (1844–1933), who at the age of 78 had been elected an Associate in 1922. The Nomination Books show that Swynnerton was first proposed in 1907, re-nominated in 1914, and then again in 1920.2 This long wait was despite having the support of such celebrated artists as John Singer Sargent who, when asked for his opinion of Swynnerton, said, ‘You want to know what I think of Mrs Swynnerton as a painter … I think she is a genius.’3 Swynnerton was not the first female artist to be nominated. The Mutrie sisters, both celebrated British flower painters, were nominated in 1867; Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler) was first nominated in 1873 and in 1879 missed election as an Associate by only a few votes. A few women artists continue to appear in the Nomination Books, such as Henrietta Rae in 1896, but it is only after the end of the First World War that there is suddenly a noticeable increase, with artists such as Anna Airy and Lucy Kemp-Welch being nominated. After Laura Knight’s election as an Associate in 1927 further modest successes followed for nominated women in the 1930s, such as Dod Procter (ARA 1934, RA 1942) (no. 1), Dame Ethel Walker (ARA 1940) and Margaret Fisher Prout (ARA 1948).

1 Dame Laura Knight DBE RA (left) and Dod Procter RA on Members’ Varnishing Day, 1967 Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 07/3516

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In an interview in the last year of her life, Swynnerton expressed frustration at having achieved only limited recognition for her work. ‘I had to struggle so hard. You see when I was young, women could not paint – or so it was said.

The world believed that and did not want the work of women, however sincere, however good. I refused to accept that. I fought and I suffered.’4 It is possible therefore that it was slightly galling for Swynnerton when Laura Knight, thirty years her junior, was rather effortlessly elected an Associate in 1927. In her autobiography of 1936 Knight was careful to present Swynnerton’s experience as different from her own. Knight recalled on meeting Swynnerton after her own success, ‘she bore a perpetual grudge against men, who, she considered, had always been against her’ and that ‘when one considers the struggle she must have had to reach mastery so tardily recognised, her bitterness is not to be wondered at’. Knight explained that, as if to add insult to injury, ‘the newspapers had broadcast the fact that I was the first woman to be elected since 1769. I wrote to the Press contradicting the statement.’5 Knight always had a wide circle of both male and female friends and seemed not to want to position herself as a victim of prejudice against women. She wanted to lead by example, demonstrate her fearlessness by immersing herself completely in subjects not traditionally associated with women’s art, such as gypsies or the circus, and give rein to her extraordinary capacity for sheer hard work.

Knight was a self-acknowledged extrovert. Recalling a childhood visit to Glasgow she noticed that ‘some people got on and off buses before they had come to a proper stop’ and determined that ‘in no feat of agility would I be bested, I (little show-off that I was) attempted to do the same. The effect was disastrous – a flat fall, face down in a pool of mud.’6 This winning combination of an acknowledgement of her enjoyment of the limelight and a capacity to make fun of herself meant that she enjoyed media attention and found that much of it was positive. Knight recalls for instance that an army of pressmen and photographers congregated outside her home at Langford Place, St John’s Wood, London, after her election as Associate. In that same year Knight agreed to feature in a British Pathé newsreel sketching and painting models in a mock artist’s studio. This silent film of ‘The Famous Artist’ includes the caption ‘Tireless and sturdy, Mrs Knight is never so happy as when she is in her beloved studio.’

In 1929 an even greater honour was bestowed on Knight when she was made a Dame of the British Empire in recognition of her services to art.

Building on her success, Knight promoted herself through two autobiographies. Both were timed perfectly to maximise attention at a time of public success. Her first, Oil Paint and Grease Paint, was published in February 1936, the same month as her election. It became a bestseller and had been reprinted twice by the end of that year. Her second was published in 1965, the year of her retrospective exhibition in the Diploma Galleries of the Royal Academy, the institution’s first one-woman show. Both books detail the poverty and hardship of her childhood and her struggle to become an artist; her message 8

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3 Harold Knight RA, Portrait of Laura Knight, 1891 Oil on canvas, 61 × 50.5 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 03/566 4 Portrait Study of Harold Knight RA, late 1950s Pencil on blue paper, 25.5 × 20.3 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 07/3302

held her back as an artist but also prevented her trying for certain scholarships for which a painting of the nude figure was often required.

Knight met Harold, her future husband, at Nottingham School of Art and recalled an early encounter when she posed for him in an empty life room (no. 3): ‘He was just eighteen when he did this remarkable work. While he was painting it, I first got a hint that I meant as much to him as he to me.’14 Despite their closeness and marriage in 1903 Knight did express a moment of doubt.

Knight explained in 1936 that, shortly before her mother died, when Laura was ‘only fourteen’, ‘some understanding was made between him and her – I was tormented by the feeling that too much was being taken for granted’.15 However theirs was a long and happy marriage (no. 4) in which they survived periods ‘when we did not know where we should find the next quarter’s rent’ and Harold never held Laura back in her enthusiasms, be it travelling with the circus or going to America by herself to be a selector for the International Exhibition of Pictures at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1922. Knight ends her second autobiography with a tribute to him, explaining that in naming the book The Magic of a Line, ‘I tell not only of the pencil point, but of life’s own line – a line never broken between us.’16 Soon after enrolling at Nottingham School of Art Knight’s grandmother and mother died within a few years of each other, which meant that she and her sister Sissie had to fend for themselves in various Nottingham lodgings while 11

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5 Dressing the Children, 1906 Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 140.3 cm Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston-upon-Hull

6 The Beach, 1908 Oil on canvas, 127.7 × 153 cm Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

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7 Ella Naper Wearing a Striped Dress, c. 1916 Pencil on paper, leaf from a sketchbook, 28.5 × 19.8 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 07/5181 8 Self-portrait (The Model), 1913 Oil on canvas, 152.4 × 127.6 cm National Portrait Gallery, London

trying to study and earn a little through teaching: ‘Sis and I then had one coat between us. She could only go out of doors when I came back from classes.’17 From 1895 Knight started submitting paintings to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition but was not successful until 1903. She moved with her sister permanently to Staithes in North Yorkshire in 1899 to join the colony of artists that had been there from the 1880s. The work she produced at Staithes often depicts women and young children, as she could afford only to pay a few pennies for the children to sit for her. Her fourth picture shown at the Royal Academy was Dressing the Children (no. 5), which, typically for this period, is painted in low tones and shows an interest in capturing the different quality of light emanating from the fire and window.18 The Knights visited Holland three times between 1904 and 1906 and much enjoyed visiting the Rijksmuseum to see works by Rembrandt and Vermeer as well as staying at Laren, an artists’ colony.

A move to join the artists’ colony at Newlyn in Cornwall in 1907–08 had a significant impact on Knight’s work. The Beach (no. 6), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1909, was a great success. Although it was based on a beach in Staithes, Knight made studies in the open air at Newlyn and the effect of this significantly lightened her palette. Knight painted many pictures of figures on the clifftops or by the sea, including The Green Feather (no. 2), and took the opportunity at last of trying to master the nude, mostly female, by sketching

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9 Study of a Boxer in the Ring at Blackfriars, c. 1937 Pen and ink on card, 13.5 Ă— 9.1 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 07/4377

and painting London models in the open air. Her increased confidence in handling the nude is demonstrated in her assertive Self-portrait (The Model) in 1913 (no. 8). The model in this painting was Ella Naper, who is also the subject of a drawing from c. 1916 (no. 7).

In 1916 Knight received a commission from the Canadian War Records Office to paint soldiers at Witley Camp in Surrey and started a series of paintings of the soldiers boxing. She continued to have an interest in the sport until the 1930s (no. 9). Fears of espionage during the First World War led to restrictions on painting out of doors although Knight was known to work surreptitiously on some of her pictures, including the large Lamorna Birch and His Daughters (1916 and 1934; University of Nottingham), which was reworked for the 1934 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The scale of the work is clear in a photograph of Knight and others in front of the painting on Members’ Varnishing Day (no. 10). The canvas predates her election as a full Royal Academician, and clearly it was important for Knight to make an impact in the Summer Exhibition in her bid to be elected. At the end of the First World War the Knights moved to London and over the next decade Laura concentrated on painting the ballet and the circus (no. 11), often drawing from 14

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10 Photograph of Dame Laura Knight DBE ARA with Lamorna Birch and His Daughters on Members’ Varnishing Day, 1934 Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 10/1237 11 Circus Horses, 1929–30 Black crayon on paper, leaf from a sketchbook, 18.3 × 23.1 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 06/4635

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2 Country Life

The excuse I offer for writing about Staithes at such length is its tremendous influence on my work, life and power of endurance. It was there I found myself and what I might do. The life and place were what I had yearned for – the freedom, the austerity, the savagery, the wildness. I loved it passionately, overwhelmingly.1

33 Two Land Girls with Plough Horses in a Field near Malvern, c. 1939–40 Watercolour on paper, 36.3 × 25.5 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 07/5166 In the exceptionally cold winter of 1939 Knight recalled that she ‘spent many weeks working on a painting in a cherry orchard’ and that the farmer ‘built up six stooks of straw to protect me from the bitter cold’.9

Apart from a year in St Quentin in France in 1889 when very young, Knight’s early years were spent in Nottingham. Towards the end of her training at Nottingham School of Art in 1897 she started visiting Staithes, a fishing village in North Yorkshire, before settling there in 1899. After her first visit she commented, ‘I was not made to be cooped in a town and sit in drawingrooms.’2 Being part of a community and getting involved in the life there were important to her: ‘As long as I can remember I had wanted to run wild in a broader life, away from factories, miles from houses in rows, dressed-up shops and the gentility of town, where no one knows what their neighbour enjoys or endures.’3 Her own insecure and impecunious upbringing undoubtedly made Knight value this communal life.

She was no exception in feeling that for her art to develop and grow she needed to experience a rural community at first hand. There were several artists’ colonies in Britain, inspired by the Barbizon School who had lived and worked around the Forest of Fontainebleau in the mid-nineteenth century, and paintings of rural people in earthy tones by artists such as Jules BastienLepage were hugely influential. There had in fact been a colony of artists in Staithes from the 1880s, attracted by the close-knit fishing village.

During their later years at Staithes the Knights, who were married in 1903, visited Holland for three summers, spending time at another artists’ colony in Laren. This village had originally been frequented from 1870 by Jozef Israëls, a member of the Hague School, and it continued to attract artists until the early twentieth century. The Knights immersed themselves there, too, in the lives of the local farmers and their families.

In 1907–08 they decided to leave Staithes and join yet another artists’ colony at Newlyn. Cornwall was attractive partly because they thought there would be more daylight hours in which to paint, but the effect of moving there on their lives and art was to be more profound. For the first time they enjoyed ‘a carefree life of sunlit pleasure, and leisurely study’.4 They socialised with other artists and Laura’s palette significantly brightened from the earthy tones of her Staithes works. She embraced new subjects, including figures on the clifftops or by the sea, the bustle of Penzance Fair and views of sheltered 43

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harbours, such as that of Mousehole (nos 34–38). Knight recalled ‘sweet memories’ of ‘warm, misty days in Mousehole by the sea when blanketed in film of grey the violet-field exhales its scent to reach full half a mile away’.5 One of the cottages the Knights stayed in was just above Mousehole and they looked down on ‘the snug circle line of pier and rail’ that was ‘draped in loop of blackish net and coil of rope’ (nos 37, 38).6 After the First World War, perhaps in response to growing recognition of their work, the Knights decided to move to London although they kept on a studio at Lamorna. In the 1920s and 1930s Laura was caught up in the excitement of drawing at the ballet and the circus, and at the end of 1929 she decided to tour Britain with the circuses of Bertram Mills and the Great Carmo. In 1931 she visited Epsom races, which led to another important series of paintings and watercolours. It was there also that she first encountered gypsies and painted many of them on the spot from the back of a vintage Rolls-Royce. She struck up a friendship with some, and they invited her to visit their large encampment on the common at Iver in Buckinghamshire (nos 39, 40). Knight visited many times in the 1930s to make drawings, paintings and watercolours recording their traditional ornate wagons, and to paint many portraits. Once again Knight was drawn to a special community and became fascinated by the way its members lived, the importance of their family ties and their old customs.

Although she appreciated the beauty of the countryside, Knight was never naïve or sentimental about the hard work involved in farming the land. Her drawings of women working in Seeding Potatoes (no. 46) demonstrate their struggle to carry heavy buckets of potatoes to plant in the muddy fields. In 1939, during the bitterly cold winter at the beginning of the war, Knight hired two horses and a plough and painted them outdoors in freezing conditions, which many years later she recalled as being awful, with endless ‘slush and mud’ (no. 33).7 Her work was not wasted, however, as she produced a number of paintings of this subject, two of which were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1949 and 1960.

In her later years Knight came to love a new landscape. She and her husband had come to know Malvern during the 1930s on their frequent summer visits to the theatre director Sir Barry Jackson and his Malvern Theatrical Festival.

After the Second World War they lived at the Colwall Park Hotel nearby.

In her sketches and paintings of the Malvern Hills Knight seems to have had a broader perspective on the landscape itself and been less involved with the people farming the countryside (nos 44, 47, 50). This was a time of great closeness with her husband, an intimacy that seemed to be echoed in her response to the landscape. ‘As I write I live again, basking in the first rays of the sun rising over the Bredon Hill to dry up the floating strands of mist hiding the flatter country to the west.’8

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34 Two Boys Sharing a Picnic, c. 1916 Pencil on paper, leaf from a sketchbook, 19.8 × 28.5 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 07/5178 This drawing dates from about 1916, when Knight was sketching at Penzance Fair and also making many studies of young women and men at leisure on Cornish clifftops.

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35 A Fairground Scene, 1916 Pencil on paper, leaves from a sketchbook, 19.8 × 57 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 07/5182 Spread across two pages of a sketchbook, this study shows fairground workers, probably at Penzance Fair, setting up or dismantling one of the rides. Knight made colour notes such as ‘yellow wheels’ under the long flat wagon.

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60 Performers in a Dressing Room (unfinished), probably 1930s Oil on canvas, 45.4 × 50.5 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 03/1140 Knight found painting dancers and performers ‘left not long enough even to fill a brush’ so she usually drew them instead. 18 Here, she attempted an oil sketch but left it unfinished.

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61 Sketches from the Bolshoi Ballet, probably 1956 Pen and black ink on paper, 36.5 × 25.6 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 07/4597 Performances by the Bolshoi Ballet at Covent Garden in the 1950s brought Knight back to the stalls with her sketchbook. This sketch possibly depicts Galina Ulanova in the title role of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.

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62 Dancer at the Folies Bergère, 1922 Crayon on paper, 21.1 × 26.8 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 07/3356 63 Performers at the Folies Bergère, 1922 Crayon on paper, 21.1 × 26.8 cm Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 07/3283 Visiting Paris in 1922, Knight was keen to draw at the Folies Bergère.

She recalled, ‘I never did so much work in any theatre in such a short time.’19 These caricature-like sketches suggest the somewhat risqué dance routines for which the Folies was famous.

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Naper, Ella 6, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21 National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa 9 Newlyn, Cornwall 13, 43–44 Nottingham Castle Art Gallery and Museum 17 Nottingham School of Art 10–13, 19, 43 Nuremberg trials 16 Old Vic, London 16 Pathé newsreels 8 Pavlova, Anna 71 Penzance Fair 43, 45–47 Picasso, Pablo, Demoiselles d’Avignon 20, 32 Pittsburgh 9, 11 Procter, Dod 7, 7 Prokofiev, Sergei 80 Prout, Margaret Fisher 7 Rae, Henrietta 7

Regent’s Park, London 54 Reid Dick, Sir William 17 Rembrandt 13 Rhodes, Joan 17, 20, 37 Richmond Park, London 54, 59 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 13 Romeo and Juliet (ballet) 80 Royal Academy 44 Knight elected to 7, 8, 10, 14, 35 Knight’s work in the RA Collection 17 Summer Exhibitions 13, 14, 16, 34 women members 7–8 Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour 9 St Quentin, France 10, 43 Sargent, John Singer 7 Second World War 16, 55 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon 16 Smith, Lilo 16 Snell, Dolly 9

Society of Women Artists 10, 17 Staithes, North Yorkshire 13, 43 Stratford-upon-Avon 16 Swynnerton, Annie 7, 8 Thompson, Elizabeth (Lady Butler) 7 Thompson, Leonard 72 The Three-Cornered Hat (ballet) 75 Ulanova, Galina 39, 80 United States of America 11, 16 Venice Biennale 9 Vermeer, Jan 13 Walker, Dame Ethel 7 War Artists’ Advisory Committee 16 Wilcox, Timothy 20 Witley Camp, Surrey 14 Women’s International Art Club 9

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