1. Laura 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.
51 Facts About Laura Knight
1. 2.
Laura Knight was greatly interested in, and inspired by, marginalised communities and individuals, including Romani people and circus performers.
3.
Laura Knight Johnson was born in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, the youngest of the three daughters of Charles and Charlotte Johnson.
4.
Laura Knight's father abandoned the family not long after her birth, and Knight grew up amid financial problems.
5.
Laura Knight's grandfather owned a lace-making factory but the advent of new technology led to the business going bankrupt.
6.
The family had relations in northern France who were in the lace-making business and in 1889 Laura Knight was sent to them with the intention that she would eventually study art at a Parisian atelier.
7.
Charlotte Johnson taught part-time at the Nottingham School of Art, and managed to have Laura Knight enrolled as an "artisan student" there, paying no fees, aged just 13.
8.
At the age of 15, and still a student herself, Laura Knight took over her mother's teaching duties when Charlotte was diagnosed with cancer and became seriously ill.
9.
Later, Laura Knight won a scholarship and the gold medal in the national student competition held by the then South Kensington Museum.
10.
Laura Knight 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.
11.
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.
12.
In Staithes Laura Knight drew the people of the fishing village and the surrounding farms, showing the hardship and poverty of their lives.
13.
Laura Knight made studies, paintings and watercolours, often painting in muted, shadowy tones.
14.
Laura Johnson and Harold Knight married in 1903 and made their first trip to the Netherlands in 1904.
15.
Laura Knight spent the summer of 1908 working on the beaches at Newlyn making studies for her large painting of children in bright sunlight.
16.
The Beach was shown at the Royal Academy in 1909, and was considered a great success, showing Laura Knight painting in a more Impressionist style than she had displayed previously.
17.
Laura 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.
18.
In 1913 Laura 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.
19.
Laura Knight deeply resented this, and Self Portrait with Nude is a clear challenge, and reaction, to those rules.
20.
Laura 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.
21.
Between 1911 until 1929, Laura Knight drew and painted backstage, some of the most famous ballet dancers of the day from Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
22.
Laura Knight's subjects included Lydia Lopokova, Anna Pavlova and the dance teacher Enrico Cecchetti.
23.
Laura Knight painted backstage, and in the dressing rooms, at several Birmingham Repertory Theatre productions.
24.
Laura Knight produced 90 prints between 1923 and 1925, including a poster advertising tram travel to Twickenham for London Transport.
25.
Laura Knight continued to produce posters for London Transport throughout her career, including one on circus clowns in 1932 and Winter Walks in 1957.
26.
In 1922, Laura Knight made her first trip to the United States, where she served on the jury at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Pictures.
27.
In 1926, Harold Laura Knight spent several months at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, in America, painting portrait commissions of surgeons.
28.
Laura Knight joined him there and was given permission to paint at the Baltimore Children's Hospital and in the black wards of the racially segregated Johns Hopkins Hospital.
29.
Whilst in Baltimore Laura Knight painted a nurse, Pearl Johnson, who took her to meetings and concerts of the early American civil rights movement.
30.
Laura Knight hired a mother and child model to pose for the composition originally known as the Madonna of the Cotton Fields.
31.
Laura Knight took these paintings back to London with her and they feature in the Pathe newsreel produced to mark her election as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1927.
32.
Laura Knight painted some of these performers, such as the clown Whimsical Wilson, several times.
33.
Laura Knight responded by painting directly onto the canvas without any preliminary drawing.
34.
In 1934 Laura Knight developed a series of circus designs for the Modern Art for the Table tableware range produced by Clarice Cliff.
35.
At the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam, Laura Knight won the Silver Medal in Painting with the painting Boxer, one of the series she had painted at Witley in 1916.
36.
In 1929 Laura Knight was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in June 1931 she received an honorary degree from St Andrews University.
37.
Laura Knight was elected president of the Society of Women Artists in 1932 and held the post until 1967.
38.
Laura Knight frequently returned to the racecourses and painted from the back of an antique Rolls-Royce car, which was large enough to accommodate her easel.
39.
From Epsom, Laura Knight was invited to the Gypsy settlement at Iver in Buckinghamshire.
40.
Laura Knight visited the Iver settlement, normally closed to outsiders, every day for several months in the late 1930s.
41.
In September 1939 Laura Knight was asked to produce a recruitment poster for the Women's Land Army, WLA.
42.
Laura Knight hired two Suffolk Punch horses and a plough from a farmer and painted them outdoors in a cherry orchard on Averills' farm in Worcestershire.
43.
Laura Knight painted her 1940 Royal Academy entry, January 1940, showing a similar scene at the same time.
44.
In total, Laura Knight had seventeen completed paintings, together with numerous studies, accepted by the WAAC, most of which were exhibited in the National Gallery or the Royal Academy during the war.
45.
The Committee agreed, and Laura Knight went to Germany in January 1946 and spent three months observing the main trial from inside the courtroom.
46.
Laura Knight explained this choice of composition in a letter to the War Artists' Advisory Committee:.
47.
In 1948, Laura Knight painted backstage at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, mostly observing the work of the wardrobe department, still working under austerity restrictions.
48.
In 1956, Laura Knight worked backstage at the Royal Opera House during performances and rehearsals by the Bolshoi Ballet.
49.
In 1961, Harold Laura Knight died at Colwall; the couple had been married for fifty-eight years.
50.
Laura Knight died on 7 July 1970, aged 92, three days before a large exhibition of her work opened at the Nottingham Castle Art Gallery and Museum.
51.
Laura Knight was a member of or affiliated with the following organisations:.