A Useful Tip

Painters often have to figure out how to deal with the screw-on tops of tubes of paint and bottles of linseed oil, turpentine and other mediums that won’t come off by hand.  Here’s how I was able this morning to open an old jar of Grumbacher cobalt drier that hadn’t been opened in years.  The cap seemed to be cemented on.  First I tried the usual approach.  I grabbed a pair of pliers and tried to twist the cap off.  No luck.  So I picked up my heavier duty pump pliers, which provided a little more pressure to the twist, and voila!  Success!  I heard the crack of the bottle neck and soon had cobalt drier squirting all over my left hand and forearm and splattering on my t-shirt, as well as on the table surface. 

That’s the way to open any old jar of medium when you can’t screw the lid off by hand.  Try it sometime.  I know I will.  Quite a bit of the cobalt drier was still in the lower three-quarters of the little jar, so I poured it into a mostly empty glass bottle I had in the studio containing some drier, some stand oil and some dammar varnish.  Years later, the Good Lord willing, when I have long forgotten how I opened the jar this morning, I will be able to apply this time-honored technique when I have the urge to experiment with cobalt drier once more and the cap will again be cemented to the bottle.

Fans are still blowing in the studio room to air out the place.  I threw away the t-shirt, a new one, of course, and the pants I was wearing.  I think I was able to wash off all the cobalt drier before it was sucked into my skin, which would eventually lead to a fatal case of cobalt poisoning.  But how can I be sure? 

In the old days, when movies had selected short subjects, there was a popular series in the 1940s and 50s called “Behind the Eight Ball with Joe McDoakes.”  I remember it as Joe Doakes, which I like better, but I can live with the truth, once in awhile.  All my life I have been that Joe McDoakes.  Joe would do stupid things like climb a tree and sit on the wrong side of the limb he was sawing off and suffer the obvious consequences of his impractical stupidity.

When things like this happen to me, as they often do, I am convinced anew that if you are as lacking in common sense as I am, if you can’t make things and fix things yourself, or don’t live with someone who can, you might as well forget about a painting career.  It just isn’t worth all the aggravation.  I remember the old aphorism that “an artist makes his own.”  That is, you can’t go to an art store and buy all the things you need, you have to come up with practical solutions for your own painting setup.  Many painters I’ve met have been able to fashion ingenious devices to simplify their work, including basic things like carriers for brushes, canvases and colors, and attachments for the palette and easel to hold all the supplies needed for a painting session.  I’m not able to do such things.  Then there are all the hours of work involved in preparing canvas and panels to get them ready for painting, work that is made more tedious for impractical souls like me.  If you are a purist for traditional painting methods and fancy the original gesso priming with chalk or marble dust and rabbit skin glue, you will be spending far more time preparing your materials than painting, or so it seems.  I tried that early in my career and made a royal sticky mess of the work. Stretching canvas and priming can take enormous amounts of time.  You can buy surfaces ready-made to paint on, but the best of them are extremely expensive and the cheap materials need to be given additional coats of primer to make them suitable for use.  And even the best of linens can have a defect in the weave that always ends up in an obvious place, for example on the subject’s face if you are painting a portrait.  Painting the picture can be the least of your problems.  There is only one solution – studio assistants to do all the dirty work.  When my ship comes in I’m going to hire one or two.

I blame Grumbacher for this current disruption of my normally serene painter’s life for another reason.  Although I willingly joined the blogosphere ostensibly to write about art matters, I realized a couple of days ago that I have offered absolutely no useful advice about the practice of oil painting on canvas, which is what I do.  One of the major reasons for this apparent abdication of my professional responsibility is that after 30 years of devotion to duty, I still don’t know what I’m doing.  I know you use brushes and oil colors and mediums to make marks on stretched canvas that hopefully will result in the peach you are staring at on the table look like the peach you are staring at.  This goal has been denigrated since Plato’s time and is especially subject to attack today with the advent of high-definition photography, which makes objects seem more real than reality itself to the uninitiated, who are in the vast majority.  As I’ve written before, we now want our realist paintings to look like our photographs.

Nevertheless, it’s what I like doing and will continue to do as long as possible.  So to make amends for my previous lack of tutorial advice, I was going to offer some practical information on a matter that was once of greater concern to representational painters than it is today.  I was going to reveal to you the secret of painting a dew drop.  What?  You already know how to paint a dew drop?  Well, hush my mouth!  I myself was bowled over when I learned about it.  This dew drop technique is so simple that even painters who attended art school should, after a day or two of concentrated effort and some aerobic exercise, be able to paint a dew drop, which was once part of a still life painter’s standard bag of tricks.   Proudly self-proclaimed self-taught artists immediately grasp the underlying principles of such useful gimmicks, which they eagerly and liberally apply to their creations.

I was fascinated for awhile by the depiction of the dew drop in oil paintings after a friend and I went a couple of times to the Greenwich Village outdoor art show in the early 1980s and passed by the booth of a painter who specialized in painting Red Delicious apples with dew drops on them.  The dew drops were such a prominent element of the paintings that we both thought the painter should eliminate the apples and just paint the dew drops. 

As you may already have surmised, I can take absolutely no credit whatsoever in developing this dew drop technical analysis.  It is the handiwork of some uncredited artist writing in an advice column in Issue No. 24 of Grumbacher’s quarterly magazine called “Palette Talk,” a 15-page publication that was handed out free at the art stores in the 1970s and 80s.  It contained articles on artists and Grumbacher art supplies and offered lots of useful tips for painters.  Most painters have come across an issue or two of this publication.  I suspect the author of the dew-drop theory was the redoubtable Helen van Wyck (1930-1994), who often contributed to the quarterly’s advice column, “Palette Scrapings.”  Van Wyck was a pioneer “how-to” artist on television, wrote a couple of books on painting and had a nice career as an artist and teacher alongside all the great Rockport and Gloucester painters of the mid-20^th Century.

My ignorant pride prevented me from ever watching the TV painters, but I was not unaware of some of their useful pronouncements.  And I understood that the kitschy wet-on-on wet technique of Bob Ross and his mentor, William “Bill” Alexander, got closer to the actual paint handling technique of many of the old masters than the work of the “academics,” who were wasting their time trying to figure out what mediums Titian and Rembrandt might have used.   A Chicago artist named D.M. Campana, who wrote a series of little paperback books called “The Teacher of Oil Painting” in the 1920s and 30s, and who had sure-fire recipes for everything you ever wanted to know about painting, was himself leery of painters like Ross and Alexander, whose predecessors apparently were called “lightning artists.”  Campana gave a good written description of their technique and counseled young artists to avoid the magician’s tricks of these commercial artists who make so many pictures of the same subject that they can paint them from memory.  He considered their paintings to be artistically worth the very little paid for them, or less.

At any rate, I was going to provide my own dew drop demonstration for my phantom readers, but the Red Delicious apple I painted the day before was still wet, and painting the dew drop wet-in-wet would have defeated the purpose of this Grumbacher-approved guaranteed method to paint a dew drop.   Since I have never officially painted a dew drop, I wanted to do it “by the book.”  This led to my unhappy encounter with Grumbacher’s cobalt drier this morning.  I was hoping I could somehow speed up the drying and take another shot at the apple.   Here is Grumbacher’s editor’s note about this important subject:  “This department constantly gets letters about painting dew drops.  We hope to answer satisfactorily all the letters with this step-by-step demonstration of dew drops.”

Grumbacher's Dew Drop Demo

Not surprisingly, I have lost interest in this project.  So you go ahead, and when the painting of the apple or tomato, which Grumbacher used, is dry, just put a tiny white highlight dot where you want the dew drop to appear.  Then smudge the highlight on the side opposite the direction of the light.  Then paint a half moon with white, black and a little local color to indicate the shape of the dew drop.  Then darken the local color and paint a shadow on the underside of the dew drop and you are done!  See, you don’t need me to grumpily hassle with my digital camera to record my own awkward demonstration.  I’m sure you can do it better yourself.  Happy painting!

Marriage Between Painters

Sir Luke Fildes (1843-1927), The Village Wedding, 1883.
  Fildes himself was married to the artist Fanny Woods

When I was young and slightly less foolish, I once had a brief fling with an extremely talented woman painter from one of those Western European countries who told me, “Don’t get your hopes up.”  So I didn’t.  I’ve always done what a woman tells me to do, starting with my mother.  This artist went on to an exciting career back home and I stayed lost in a fog stateside.  Probably would have been a mistake anyway.  I never had another such golden opportunity to enjoy the constant companionship of another painter.   I assume it must be nice to talk about art with a spouse who really understands what you are talking about. 

But I may be absolutely wrong.  It would be hell if you didn’t share the same feelings about painting techniques and painters.  And a competitive spouse would be worse.  Perhaps it’s more important to marry an investment banker who just wants to show you off at Park Avenue parties and is willing to keep you supplied with endless tubes of cobalt violet.  Or to wed a gainfully employed practical woman who can stop the bleeding when you cut yourself with the edge of a sharp palette knife, bake a cherry pie, vacuum the place once in awhile and tell you what a nice little picture you have just painted, when you know all you’ve produced in the last millennium is simply crap.  I don’t know anything about anything.  That’s what I’m good at and well-known for.  Or so I’m always told.  Man, it’s hot in New York City these days!

So I’m eminently unqualified to discuss the subject of artists’ marriages, but I’ve come across a few from days gone by in which both painters were able to continue having successful art careers during their years of connubial bliss.  Even if it wasn’t bliss, I don’t want to know about it.  That soap opera saga I got caught up in when writing about Dame Laura Johnson Knight and Harold Knight and, tangentially, my sullied hero A.J. Munnings, wore me out.  Blogging, like painting, should be fun, not hard work.  I’m not Pliny the Elder for gosh sakes! 

So here’s my brief list of equally talented painters who survived and thrived as married couples:

Herman Wessel (1878-1969) and Bessie Hoover Wessel (1889-1973), Cincinnati-based Impressionists.  The Wessels followed in the footsteps of their teacher and mentor, Frank Duveneck, one of several famous Cincinnati painters.  They were leading figures in the town’s art scene for many years. Herman and Bessie were married in 1917 at Duveneck’s cottage in Gloucester, MA.  They had one child, a son.  I love Bessie Wessel’s portraits and still lifes.  And some of her boldly colored, patchwork landscapes are novel and very interesting.  They were painted on dark green canvas window shades, and she used their dark color to good advantage in the interstices between her patches of color.  All of her work is full of vitality, with bold brushwork, gorgeous color and solid form.  Some of Herman’s work is also excellent, but I prefer her paintings overall.

Bessie Wessel, Old-Fashioned Roses

Bessie Wessel, The Red Coat

Bessie Wessel, Still Life

Bessie Wessel, St. Tropez

Bessie Wessel, Rockport Blacksmith Shop

Herman Wessel

Herman Wessel, Portrait of Bessie Wessel

Herman Wessel, Anderson Ferry

Philip Leslie Hale (1865-1931) and Lilian Westcott Hale (1881-1963), Boston Impressionists. They were married in 1902.  She was the more successful artist, judging by the volume of her portrait work and all the awards she won, but he was an influential instructor and art critic who championed the Boston School of painting.  He did a couple of paintings I really like.  In a biography about the couple written by Nancy Hale, their only child, I enjoyed the story about a woman who had been painted years ago by Lilian with her bare knees showing and now wanted them covered.  Lilian said she would do it if the woman would bring her some lace so she could paint from the actual material.  The Boston painters wanted everything just right and in place before they started to work – no spur of the moment lucky accidents for Paxton et al.

Philip Leslie Hale, The Crimson Rambler, 1908

Philip Leslie Hale Painting a Model

Lilian Westcott Hale, L'edition de luxe, 1910

Lilian Westcott Hale, Child with Yarn

Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947) and Elizabeth (1859–1912) Armstrong Forbes, Realist painters working in the plein air style of naturalism developed by Jules Bastien-Lepage and others in France in the late 19^th Century.  They were the founders and guiding lights of the magical Newlyn School in Cornwall, England.   They were married in 1889 and had one child, a son, who died in battle in the First World War.  They both had mastered the craft of painting.  Elizabeth was Canadian by birth and studied at The Art Students League before moving to Europe for good with her mother. She died of cancer in 1912, and three years later Stanhope married a former student and family friend, Maudie Palmer.  Stanhope is one of my favorite painters of all time for his honest, accurate and sensitive handling of scenes of daily life, both outside and inside the studio.  His figure work is just outstanding. What a wonderful draughtsman he was.  And Elizabeth painted some remarkably good paintings herself in the same style.

Stanhope Forbes, Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach

Stanhope Forbes, To the Health of the Bride

Elizabeth Forbes, School is Out, 1889

Elizabeth Forbes, her son, Alec, Age 12

 

Elizabeth Forbes, Blackberry Gathering, 1912

Elmer Wachtel (1869-1929) and Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel (1875-1954), California Impressionist landscape painters. She and Elmer married in 1904.  They had no children.  During their marriage, she painted in watercolor, out of deference to him, I’m sure, but switched to oils upon his death. In a newspaper review of her watercolors in 1903, the writer said, “She handles watercolors in a free, fearless way, more like a man than a woman."  It’s hard for me to tell the difference between the two of them in their oils, both of them painted so much alike on similar scenic landscape views.  Elmer Wachtel’s early works were tonalist in mood, but he lightened his palette later on.  Marion studied in Chicago at the Art Institute and in New York with William Merritt Chase before moving to the Far West.  Elmer trained and performed professionally as a violinist before taking up painting.  He also studied with Chase at The Art Students League in New York.  The Wachtels were inseparable companions and traveled to their various painting locations by foot, by horseback or in a motor car specially outfitted for their painting needs.
 

Elmer Wachtel

Elmer Wachtel, Santa Anita Canyon

Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel, Mount Whitney, Oil on Canvas

Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel, Watercolor

Marion Kavanaugh Wachtel, Laguna Canyon, Oil on Canvas

Well, that’s my little list.  I’ve only included artists whose realist work I like very much.  There are many other artists’ marriages that make for interesting study, including the well-publicized, stormy marriage of the painters Edward Hopper and Jo Nivison Hopper.   She kept diaries detailing the ups and downs in their highly competitive 42-year marriage.   But I’m pretty exhausted by the whole subject of this blog post, to be honest with you. 

There are plenty of other images on the Internet for the artists on my list, all of whom have earned a somewhat lasting reputation among lovers of representational art.  And there is plenty of biographical information on websites and blogs.  Is there anybody in America who isn’t writing a blog today? You can even find stuff about Pliny the Elder on the Internet!  And that, no doubt, is more entertaining than most of the fluff about painters that gets posted.  Why should I do all the research?  That’s the Internet’s job and yours, not mine.  I’m feeling overwhelmed right now by the glut of images available for popular artists from any period, in multiples, with your choice of small, medium or large resolutions.  “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take six of those small resolution images, please.  I much prefer that indistinct thumbnail size.”  And then there are all the websites and blogs of today’s painters who post images of every 6 by 6 inch painting of three strawberries that they “create” and will undoubtedly sell to people who put stuff like that on their kitchen walls.  And then there are artists who post every blessed mark they make on paper on a daily basis.  And look at me whining away while I produce even more drivel during this sultry heat wave we are experiencing here in the Center of the Universe.  You have to laugh at it all. 

But moving right along, I think it must be nearly impossible to live together in a marriage as true creative equals.  One spouse will always adopt, at the very least, a slightly different creative approach to avoid being in direct competition with the other.  Consider how few such unions there are among classical music composers.  Who do we have there?  Maybe Robert and Clara Schumann, although she was more famous as a pianist and for promoting her husband’s work.  Anybody else?  Wagner’s second wife, Cosimo, the daughter of Franz Liszt, was certainly a great help in promoting his career, but probably didn’t prune any notes from the Ring Cycle.  Painters like Renoir had their wives washing their brushes.  Now that’s what every painter wants, someone to wash their brushes!  

The marriage of Carl Larsson (1853-1919) and Karin Bergoo Larsson (1859-1928) is a case study in what usually happens when two painters of unequal talent marry, in my considered opinion.  Carl and Karin met in the Scandinavian artists’ colony in the village of Grez outside Paris. They were married in 1883, and the first of their eight children was born in 1884.  Karin immediately stopped painting.  She and the children were Carl Larsson’s favorite models for his world-famous watercolors extolling domestic happiness and the virtues of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
 

Carl Larsson, Crayfishing, 1897

Carl Larsson, Name Day Celebration, 1895

Carl Larsson, Christmas Eve, 1904

Carl Larsson, Now Is It Christmas Again, 1907

Carl Larsson, Mamma's and the small girls' room, 1897

Carl and Brita

Karin and Kersti

Karin Bergoo, Still Life, 1877

Karin Bergoo, Mother Morot

The Drawing Room at Lilla Hyttnas

Karin proceeded to devote full time to the family and their home.  That’s the natural law for most women artists whose husbands are more gifted than they are.  But she was no docile servant for Carl.  She became his chief critic for his paintings and was the principal decorator for their influential arts and crafts home, which was so charmingly depicted in Carl’s paintings.  Named Lilla Hyttnäs, the cottage was a gift of Karin’s father.  Lilla Hyttnäs, in Sundborn, Sweden, was like a mutual art project for Carl and Karin, growing piecemeal in accordance with the couple’s shared aesthetic taste.  Karin was also an innovative textile designer, who designed and wove many of the textiles that played a prominent role in the decoration of the house and in Carl’s paintings.

Did she resent giving up her own painting career?  The Swedish playwright August Strindberg, a former champion of Carl Larsson’s work, decidedly thought she did, calling their seemingly happy marriage just one big lie.  There aren’t many examples of her paintings to be found anywhere, and those few examples are inconclusive regarding her talent.  Was she truly content with the choices she made?  In an early letter to Carl, she wrote, “My dear idiot! Thank goodness I had the idea of getting engaged to you.  It’s the best way I could think of to get away from that confounded painting!”  In “Carl and Karin Larsson, Creators of the Swedish Style,’’ the editors recount the story of a former housekeeper who remembers a ritual the couple had of standing together in front of  Carl’s latest painting, their arms around each other, discussing lines and colors for quite some time.  Eventually, Karin would say, “Don’t touch it any more, Carl -- it’s fine.”  The former housekeeper said she “didn’t mean to watch all this.  But it was so beautiful that I couldn’t help it.”

In the end, it really doesn’t matter why Karin gave up painting.  Her marriage to Carl turned out to be far more significant for both of them than if she had just remained his easel partner through life.  She found her own identity by creating the family and the environment at Lilla Hyttnäs that enabled Carl Larsson to thrive as an artist and ultimately gain world fame with his joyously colored and beautifully drawn watercolor journals of an idyllic life together.  If your own childhood was miserable, you couldn’t help but envy their impossibly utopian vision of domestic bliss -- a happy home filled with children and love and clean curtains and backyard picnics under the shade of birch trees and the best of times forevermore. That’s the world Karin and Carl Larsson gave to the rest of us, and it shines as bright today as when it was created.  She always told people she was “the happiest woman in the world.”  I believe she wasn’t lying.

Dame Laura and Harold

Laura Knight, Ballet Dancer and Dressmaker

There has never been a Dame like Laura Johnson Knight (1877-1970).  Her husband, Harold Knight (1874–1961), who created some of the finest figure paintings I’ve ever seen, always played second fiddle to her brilliant and much celebrated painting career during their long marriage.

He was one of the best painters at the Nottingham School of Art when Laura Johnson enrolled there in 1890 at the age of 13, perhaps the youngest student ever accepted at the school.  Harold was only 16 at the time.  A year later he painted a beautiful profile portrait of her when she was just 14 and he 17.  She liked his work and figured the best way to learn how to paint was to copy his technique, watching from her easel set up behind his own.  Both won many awards during their student days.  They stayed friends and eventually married in 1903.

Harold Knight, Academic Study

Harold Knight, Laura Johnson, Age 14

There are very few marriages of equally talented painters in the recorded history of representational art.   I think the Knights may be the best husband and wife painters of them all.   In most artist marriages, only one of the equally talented spouses achieved greatness.  The balance of power usually accrued to the husband in his role of principal breadwinner, according to social mores, I would guess. Sometimes, to avoid being in direct competition with each other, one spouse continued to work in oils and the other switched to the use of another medium, usually watercolor, or simply chose to paint different subject matter.  Of course there have been many artist marriages of equals that survive intact when fame and fortune are not calling on them.

 

The Knights had no children, so the formidable Dame Laura was free to pursue a lifelong commitment to excellence in all of her many and varied artistic endeavors.   I’m aware of three or four other notable artist marriages that thrived when no children, or one at the most, were involved. But I also know two promising young painters who got married and moved to the country after studying traditional oil painting techniques in art school.  The wife, it seems, was particularly suited to being a mother, so the husband kept painting and teaching while the wife gave birth to nine children, pretty much one after another.  The kids are all grown up, so I assume she is able to paint as much as she likes now.

As Mary Cassatt famously said near the end of her life, “There’s only one thing in life for a woman; it’s to be a mother.”  What if she and the irascible Degas had married and raised a family!  “Most women paint as though they are trimming hats,” Degas told her. “Not you.”  “I do not believe a woman can draw like that.” “She has infinite talent.”  Well, there was talk about a relationship, you know.

The marriage of Dame Laura and Harold Knight lasted for 58 years, until his death in 1961, so I guess it was a pretty happy union and they were able to come to terms with the professional jealousy that,  it seems to me, would be an entirely natural reaction when one spouse gets more public acclaim than the other.

Laura Knight, Self-Portrait with Ella Napper

Harold Knight, Alfred Munnings

 

Harold Knight, Ella Napper

But hold on!  There was more to this marriage than just painting.  I recently received a dispatch here at the Home Office from the marital front, and it seems that Dame Laura was infatuated with Sir Alfred James Munnings, the extraordinary equestrian painter, whom Harold detested, and Harold was infatuated with the beautiful artist Ella Napper, who had befriended them both.  In Dame Laura’s wonderfully clever self-portrait from 1913, Ella is the nude model.  And Harold made a nice portrait of Ella.  Well, there you are.  I knew it!  No marriage was made in heaven.  Both infatuations apparently were just that, so the marriage endured.  I’m very interested in this gossip, and there’s a lot more to be said about it, but I just must restrain myself and get back to the art of Dame Laura and Harold.

Dame Laura is in the news because the National Portrait Gallery in London is showing more than 30 of her portraits in an exhibit that opened July 11 and runs through October 13.  A brief introduction on the gallery’s website states that “Knight used portraiture to capture contemporary life and culture, and her paintings are remarkable for their diverse range of subjects and settings. This exhibition…will reveal Knight’s highly distinctive and vivid work, and also illustrate her success in gaining greater professional recognition for women in the arts.”   Formal portraiture was not her strength, though.  For example, an oil portrait she did of George Bernard Shaw was not considered a good likeness or a good painting.  Her husband, on the other hand, was an outstanding portrait painter.

Laura Knight, George Bernard Shaw

Harold Knight, Portrait of Admiral Edwyn Sinclair

Harold Knight, Portrait of Lord ILkeston

Harold Knight, Portrait of William Henry Bragg

Dame Laura must have had tons of energy.  She excelled in taking on enormous challenges in her career to paint a wide variety of subjects unexplored by her contemporaries.  And she was able to capture her subjects with incredible vivacity and accuracy on canvas because she could draw and paint better than just about anybody around in her day, man, woman or beast.  Her career is documented in great detail, and she herself completed two autobiographies, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (1936) and The Magic of a Line (1965).
 

Not all of her work was well-received by the critics, particularly her nudes, beginning with that 1913 self-portrait with the nude model Ella Napper shown above, which was criticized severely for its “vulgar” nudity.  In the July 1928 issue of “Creative Art” magazine, A.L. Baldry, upon reviewing a Royal Academy exhibit, stated that “Mrs. Laura Knight’s aggressive nudes are too ponderously commonplace and too laboriously realistic to be aesthetically acceptable.”   In the June 1930 issue of the same magazine, Gui St. Bernard wrote more kindly that “Mrs. Laura Knight can generally be relied upon for an interesting design in her presentations of circus clowns and ballet dancers, especially when she avoids large compositions.  One of her most attractive canvases this year is the Ballet Dancer and Dressmaker."

Lovers of her painting were decidedly in the majority and tended to disagree heartily with such criticism.  Other artists and the public alike found her work to be strong, colorful, cheerful, full of life and exciting, never stale or boring.  And she could really draw.  It was said that her sketches of ballet dancers in the 1930s were considered to be so accurate that a famous dance instructor used them to show his students what they had done wrong.  One admirer wrote in a blog that Dame Laura’s paintings were “a visual delight” that left her smiling all the way through an exhibit of her work.

While Laura was in or out of the studio painting a wide assortment of extremely difficult subjects, including backstage tours de force of circus clowns, ballet dancers and gypsies,  Harold was home in his studio quietly painting excellent portraits and Vermeer-like interiors in abundance that remind me of the paintings produced concurrently in America by the Boston School, but with a more sober approach to color and form. 

Harold Knight, Portrait of Laura Knight

 

  
Although not as well-known and adored by the public as Dame Laura, Harold probably got more respect from the critics.  In an essay in the July 1928 issue of  “Creative Art” magazine, Herbert B. Grimsditch (yes, indeedy, a name fit for Dickens) praises Harold’s “solidity of form” and observes that his “perception of soft lights is exquisite, and he renders gradations of tone and atmosphere with loving care and unusual ability…it is as a calm, meticulous and skillful craftsman that Mr. Knight may be picked out from the crowd.”  Grimsditch  says Harold “is a painter eminently peaceful in method and temperament, who has quietly worked on and perfected his craftsmanship until he now stands very high in his profession.  There is nothing in his work to excite controversy…the sheer skill and beauty of the actual painting makes his work insusceptible to analysis.”  And he could draw hands!  “He sees as much character in the hand as in the face, and the care and understanding with which he interprets it form an index to his aims and his personality.  This is realism in excelsis.” 

When Harold died in 1961, Dame Laura arranged an exhibition of his pictures and then set about arranging for exhibitions of her own work.  Janet Dunbar, author of a 1975 biography on Dame Laura, wrote that the exhibits “showed her astounding range in oils, watercolor, etchings, and pencil drawings, with subjects which included landscape, seascape, the Cornish sunlight on nudes, circus scenes, Gypsies, ballet dancers and actors, bomber crews and balloon sites in wartime, and the Nuremberg trial, all executed with incredible facility.”

Two years after their marriage in 1903, Laura and Harold sold enough paintings in a gallery exhibition to fund a tour of Europe.  When they got back, they settled in Newlyn, Cornwall, an artist’s colony that harbored some fabulous painters working in the naturalist style of realism championed by Bastien-LePage in late 19^th Century France.  

The Newlyn painters included another married couple who were both excellent oil painters, Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes, although Stanhope was by far the dominant creative force in that relationship. Three other key members of the colony were Walter Langley, Frank Bramley and, wouldn’t you know, Alfred Munnings, then in an unhappy, turbulent first marriage that eventually led to his troubled young wife’s suicide.   The real-life love triangle between Alfred, his friend Gilbert Evans and the girl they both loved, Florence Carter-Wood, was first the subject of a book and now a just-released movie, both titled, “Summer in February.”  The movie also depicts Laura Knight’s unrequited love for Munnings and the jealousy of her husband Harold, who also harbored feelings for Florence, as well as for Ella, apparently.  You remember Ella from a few paragraphs above.  The old, old tale goes round and round.  It’s easy to get sidetracked when there is so much juicy gossip to soften the edges of history.  So on we go.

During the First World War, Harold was a conscientious objector who was put to work as a farm laborer.  After the war the couple left Cornwall and moved to London, settling permanently in 1922 in the St.John’s Wood district, where each had a studio.

Laura started on her wide-ranging painting adventures in the 1920s when the circus owner Bertram Mills gave her permission to roam freely around his circus during rehearsals.  Her biographer Dunbar wrote that she “was soon producing studies of trapeze artists, acrobats, tumblers, jugglers, contortionists, as well as dwarfs, clowns, and the circus animals.  She painted a huge canvas, “Charivari,” which brought in nearly everyone in circus life; it was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1929 and was caricatured in “Punch,” with politicians portrayed as the various circus performers.” 
  
Laura had established herself as the most important woman artist in Britain.   In 1929, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the first woman artist so honored, and in 1936 became the first woman to be elected to full membership in the Royal Academy of Arts since it was founded in 1768 by a group of 34 artists, including two women painters, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser.  A year after Laura’s election, Harold was elected a Royal Academician as well.

During the Second World War, Laura became an official war artist. Her best known painting for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee was of a woman munitions worker, “Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring.”  After the war, she was the official artist at the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi war criminals.   One painting she created is titled “The Dock, Nuremberg,” 1946.


Dame Laura, who was raised in an impoverished middle-class Nottingham family, apparently never forgot her humble origins.  When she was comfortably well off decades later, she was presented to the Prince of Wales and famously insisted on taking the bus home.  She remained actively exhibiting and painting right up to the day she died on July 7, 1970 at the age of 92. 
 
Dame Laura and Harold.  Two of many great realist painters in the “land of hope and glory” in the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries.  They were married to art and to each other.  What a perfect combination.  I’d love to have eavesdropped on all the art talk that must have gone on between them when they took their morning tea.  Rule Britannia!