The Show is On: Laura Knight’s Career and Contexts

Janet Axten, ‘Fast, Smart and Outrageous’: Art School Fashion in Laura Knight’s Painting

In 1913, six years after Laura and Harold Knight had moved to Newlyn, Cornwall, from Staithes in Yorkshire, Laura met Dorelia John who, with Augustus, had descended on nearby Lamorna. Dorelia’s striking appearance provoked Knight’s observation: ‘Her clothes were of her own particular style, and it was she who set the fashion for jumpers and short hair’.

This paper explores the connection between fashion and modernity in Knight’s painting. Laura Knight had always been interested in clothes; she mentions them regularly in her autobiography Oil Paint and Grease Paint. She was an excellent seamstress and had made her own wedding dress. She recalls that Harold would paint models wearing her clothes and, memorably, The Green Feather (1911) depicted her friend Dorothy Snell in an exotic emerald green evening gown of stiff silk.

The light of west Cornwall transformed the way Knight painted, brightening her palette. Nevertheless, in the early years of the decade her models were shown in static poses. Young Edwardian women and girls would often sit demurely on the grass with the sea in the background, wearing light floating long dresses, ribbons, and straw bonnets. (In the Fields, watercolour)

Knight’s response to Dorelia was startling. The young women she painted now inhabited a different century. They wore long wool belted sweaters over calf-length skirts and were often bare-headed. They lounged on cliff edges, sat by rock pools, and appeared to be conversing. (In Cornwall, watercolour; The Cornish Coast, oil on canvas)

Since 1899, large numbers of young single women had travelled to Newlyn for an opportunity of tuition at the Forbes School of Painting, under the brilliant tutelage of Elizabeth Forbes. The few years prior to the outbreak of the First World War was one of female freedom and experimentation; Knight called the students ‘fast, smart and outrageous’. With the tragic death of Elizabeth Forbes in 1912 at the age of 52, Knight became the most influential woman painter in the area.

Axten’s research provides new perspectives on Knight through her painterly response to rural feminine modernity, far from any metropolitan centre of culture and fashion. Newlyn’s art school provided women with a place to express their creativity, and this paper will discuss how their unique fashionability is articulated in Knight’s work. Inadvertently, Knight’s modernism would lead to Newlyn becoming the home of Crysède Silks; an international company making fashions for a new and sophisticated female consumer market.

Linda Basset, The ‘Sew’ Must Go On: The Dressmaker in the Work of Laura Knight

During her career Laura Knight produced a number of works which depicted various scenes backstage at both the ballet and theatre. These works are associated with the drama and tension of the performance itself, as well as the more mundane preparations which precede it. Whilst the glamour and energy of the performers would appear to be the primary focus of these works, there is, however, another motif which occurs frequently – that of the dressmaker.

To date, little attention has been paid to the presence of this figure in Knight’s work, yet their role is crucial in delivering a much broader, visual narrative. Certainly, their recurring appearance would seem to suggest that Knight acknowledged their wider significance. With reference to four examples in particular, Dressing Room No. 1 (1923), Dressing For the Ballet (1927), The Ballet Girl and the Dressmaker (1930), and Preparing for her Entrance (c. 1930), this paper examines the role of the dressmaker within Knight’s visual narrative. Comparison with the original versions of these works (where relevant) is also made, supporting the premise that these figures, in fact, contribute significantly to female presence and visibility. The complex dynamic between dancers and dressmakers is surveyed, revealing these relationships as an integral feature of life behind the curtain, but one which remained largely unfamiliar to the public who viewed Knight’s work.

Knight’s dressmakers do not merely provide a decorative foil within the domain of performance — they may be read in their own right as visual elements which comment more broadly on the position of women in both professional and wider, cultural contexts. Their inclusion by Knight encourages debate on how professional women were viewed in the early twentieth century. Moreover, they represent a solid challenge to the dominant, albeit less savoury, doctrines of visual culture concerning professional women that emerged from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, concerned with moral and sexual impropriety. Knight’s dressmakers should be neither overlooked nor underestimated, as this paper demonstrates.

Ella Nixon, Laura Knight and the Regional Art Gallery

The Laing Art Gallery collection contains thirteen prints, three oil paintings, three watercolours, and a Circus dinner set by Laura Knight. It has been theorised that the Laing Art Gallery’s first curator, Collingwood Bernard Stevenson (1874–1957), collected works by Knight because of his personal connection to the artist stemming from their shared time at school in Nottingham.

Since the gallery’s foundation in 1904, Knight’s work has been exhibited in various guises: a 1933 exhibition of the artist, inclusion in the annual Northern Counties exhibition, and most recently as one of the four artists featured in Challenging Convention (2021). The Beach (c.1909) even features as a mural on the outer wall of the Laing.

The intricate connection between the Laing and the artist raises wider questions regarding the representation of female artists within regional galleries. Feminist art history has overwhelmingly focused on the representation of women artists within national museums. However, the prominence of Knight in the Laing collection reflects the existence of a network of local and personal connections, with implications for how her work is understood by local communities. Knight herself sought to avoid categorisation based on her sex, instead attributing her success to hard work. It is crucial to understand the agencies that underpin national narratives and already, within gender history, new methodologies have been deployed to uncover a diversity of experiences. This paper will build upon this approach to interpret Knight’s works within regional collections with particular focus on the role of museums within the ‘civic community’ (Bennett, 1995).

Accordingly, this paper utilises the conceptual tool ‘collecting communities’ (Nixon, 2020) to explore the acquisition patterns of Knight’s works in regional galleries throughout Britain. Collecting communities is a theory inspired by Simon Szreter’s ‘communication communities’, which considers factors including age, class, and gender in shaping behavioural norms and identities (Szreter, 2002: 546). Adjusted for a museological setting, the theory can be utilised to examine the collecting patterns of regional galleries in the context of its perceived ‘public’.

Archival materials provide insight into the collecting practices of works by the artist. Moreover, the collecting patterns of Knight’s works will be compared to both contemporaries of the artist and current collecting patterns of women artists using mapping techniques. The paper concludes by focusing on Knight’s inclusion in the recent Challenging Convention exhibition, providing a modern interpretation of the artist from a regional perspective.

Lily Ford, Aerial Bodies: Laura Knight’s Barrage Balloon Paintings

Laura Knight was one of the only artists allowed close access to the ‘silver sentinels of the sky’ that dominated Britain’s wartime landscapes: the barrage balloons. Two paintings of them, In for Repairs (1941) and A Balloon Site, Coventry (1943), are among her WAAC commissions on women’s war work. Knight was fascinated by the visual riddles these objects posed, their lumbering size and difficulty of manoeuvre alongside their fragility and ethereal appearance. She gendered them female and called them silver toads. She was full of admiration for the women in charge of their care and deployment – most of the 33,000 people employed as balloon operatives during the Second World War were women between 1941 and 1943.

Ford’s filmic investigation will look closely at Knight’s own account of working with balloons and consider the artistic challenges they posed. It will explore the cultural existence of the inflatables both in and outside war art, taking into consideration their meaning in a landscape, and the imagined aerial perspective that they offered (for example to cartographer Cecil Brown in his 1946 Devastated London). It will investigate the practicalities of working with barrage balloons as an operative, and the heritage of aviation textiles work done by women, dating back to before the First World War.

Catherine Wallace, Technique and Experiment: Drawing as the Foundation of Laura Knight’s Success as an Artist

In this paper Wallace discusses the importance of drawing as a foundation for the success of Laura Knight’s artistic career and in some ways the greatest skill at her disposal. From her student portraits; her depictions of Cornish harbours; her drawings of ballet dancers and circus performers to her studies of the Nuremberg Trials – this paper illustrates how her drawings had great power and energy, conveying a very different quality to her finished paintings.

When reviewing her lifetime’s work, drawing was a technique that she used repeatedly not only as studies to inform her as to the subject of a final painting but as works of art in their own right. Wallace compares some of Knight’s studies with the finished oil works and explores their differences.

Drawing is a technical skill based on the traditions taught in academic institutions. Laura Knight pushed the boundaries of that formal training, which was laid down in Nottingham, and used it in new and different ways as she developed as an artist. She also combined elements of drawing with painting in her mixed media works that included charcoal, watercolour, gouache, and pastel. Her drawings became experiments with these different combinations of media. In this paper, Wallace illustrates and discusses works which combine these different media and demonstrates how Knight came to control and master them.

The presentation concludes on an investigation into how Laura Knight’s powerful drawings of the Nuremberg trials are visual summations of the characters involved. This is shown by focusing in on individual poses of figures, which when applied to the final painting convey a balanced sense of movement in an otherwise static scene.

Hannah Starkey, So, I ask you Laura Knight - how did this great work come about?

As I sit in my studio looking at both these images, yours on the left and mine on the right, I ask you Laura Knight – how did this great work come about? A conversation between a live artist and a dead one. Voiced by the live artist so the audience can hear it.

A performance of the interior externalised. My mind and my studio wall both of which Laura Knight has preoccupied, is a space I never get to share. Our internal conversation when looking at a work of art particularly between two artists, one alive and one dead is something I would like to attempt to share with the audience. It is a performance that hopes to pay homage and gratitude to a great artist and her legacy which as a contemporary artist, I am currently enjoying. It is a magic space that I hope to share with others, live and on stage.

Alice Strickland, Creating a Legacy – Dame Laura Knight RA (1877–1970)

On her death in 1970 Laura Knight bequeathed to the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) the silver salver she had been given by the Society of Women Artists (SWA) some 34 years earlier. Knight was the SWA’s longest serving president from 1932–68 and exhibited at their annual exhibition throughout her membership. Knight’s gift of this particular object to the RA and its association with the SWA is inextricably linked to her being the first woman to be elected as full Royal Academician since Mary Moser RA and Angelica Kauffman RA. This paper proposes to highlight Knight’s work within women’s societies including as President of the SWA, Vice-President of the Forum Club and as a member of the Women’s International Art Club (WIAC). Laura Knight’s promotion of her own work and the careers of contemporary women artists, through election to exhibiting societies, exhibitions, publications and press coverage, offers a vital insight into the professionalisation of women artists during the first half of the twentieth century. Research for this paper will draw upon the SWA’s and WIAC’s archive of minutes and exhibition catalogues held at the Women’s Art Library, University of London and the National Art Library, V&A. The paper will seek to highlight how Laura Knight sought to create her own artistic legacy and how she is viewed over forty years after her death.

Hester Westley, ‘Like a Half-Rolled Map’: Tracing the Borders of Female Self-Narration in the Careers of Laura Knight and Subsequent Women Artists

Drawing on Laura Knight's autobiographical writing, this paper considers Knight's self-representation and its significance for her artistic legacy and reception of her work. This paper integrates the rich audio resources offered by the Artists’ Lives archive – part of National Life Stories based at the British Library – to situate Knight within a context of twentieth-century women artists to examine how they narrate their life stories and practice. While male counterparts were guilty of literally writing women artists out of the history books, this paper examines the importance for women artists of finding their own voices to shape and narrate the telling of their own life stories.

Comparing these women artists’ consideration of certain commonalities and intersectional themes – for example, the space of the studio; their approach to working with the life model and their own relationship with sitter; and the representation of the domestic sphere, often complicated through marriage to a male artist – this paper traces intergenerational threads to understand how the women artists themselves determine agency and subjectivity in defining a space of their own. This power of narration is neatly encapsulated in a critical distinction: self-representation is less ‘what I appear’ than ‘this is what I believe in’.

In addition to audio extracts drawn from the Artists’ Lives archive, this presentation weaves into its discussion archival images and footage of women artists discussing their approaches to representation. This paper rights – and rewrites – the legacy of Laura Knight through her own autobiographical voice and communicates with subsequent generations of women artists who have used the retelling of their life story to affirm their place in the history of British art.

Damian Le Bas, The Broken Tongue

Damian Le Bas will read a series of poems about the British Gypsy experience that may chime with some of Laura Knight’s incredible paintings of rural Romany life.

For the past six years Le Bas has been writing prose, with few exceptions, but before that, he used to write a lot of poetry. Poetry was the first thing Le Bas tried really hard to write well. It seemed to be the natural way to write about Romany Gypsy history and culture, and the experience of being a Traveller in modern Britain, all its unsung joys and travails, the prejudices, the secret wells of strength.

There’s something about Travellers and poetry. When Le Bas edited a magazine for Travellers, one of their biggest mailbags was of poems written by readers. He thinks there are many reasons for this. Travellers prize songs and singing, and of all the written arts poetry is the one most closely tethered to song. Poems seem to provide a natural home for the Traveller languages: the Romany language of British Romany Gypsies, the Gamin of the Irish Travellers, the Beurla-Reagaird of the Scottish Travellers of the Highlands, and the Romanès of Britain’s more recently arrived Roma people, which in form and often in sound is still very much the Indian language it was when their forebears first carried it out of Asia in their minds. Poems welcome strange words into themselves: they don’t seem to judge you for being different, or for having many tongues. Other than text messages sent to family members, and the odd little word list he used to compile as a child, poems were the first place where he found he could make a home for his ‘other mother tongue’, the Romany language or, as some people call it, the poggerdi jib - the ‘broken tongue’.