Laura Knight
Painted the circus, the ballet, wartime factories and the Nuremberg trials, and was made a Dame for it.
Laura Knight was born at Long Eaton in 1877 and trained at Nottingham School of Art, where women were barred from life classes — a restriction she spent a career overturning. She worked at Staithes, then in the Newlyn colony in Cornwall, and made her name with sunlit outdoor figure paintings. Later subjects were the circus and travelling fairs, the Ballets Russes, and, as an official war artist, factory workers, including the widely reproduced portrait of Ruby Loftus screwing a breech ring. She was sent to record the Nuremberg trials in 1946. She was the first woman elected a full Royal Academician in the modern era and died in 1970, at ninety-two.
A very long career and several distinct subjects, and where a picture falls among them matters commercially more than the medium does. Oils are unique; there is also a large body of watercolours, drawings and etchings, and she made a number of published prints. Circus, ballet and gypsy subjects are the ones most asked for. Because the output is large and long, dating is often approximate and the signature — usually Laura Knight, sometimes with initials — is not by itself sufficient identification. Exhibition labels and Royal Academy records help.
If you own a work by Laura Knight
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.