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| 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.
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| Harold Knight, Academic Study |
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| 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.
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| Laura Knight, Self-Portrait with Ella Napper |
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| Harold Knight, Alfred Munnings |
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| 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.
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| Laura Knight, George Bernard Shaw |
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Harold Knight, Portrait of Admiral Edwyn
Sinclair
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| Harold Knight, Portrait of Lord ILkeston |
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| 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.
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| 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 19th 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 19th and early 20th 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!
