Laura Knight valuation
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.
What a work by Laura Knight is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 4 August 1877, Long Eaton
- Died
- 7 July 1970, London
- Movement
- Impressionism
More on Wikipedia.
The Royal Academy, and the 1913 self-portrait
Knight was made a Dame in 1929 and in 1936 became the first woman elected to full membership of the Royal Academy, which gave her a large retrospective in 1965, the first it had held for a woman. The Beach, painted at Newlyn in the summer of 1908, was a success at the Academy in 1909.
Her Self Portrait of 1913, showing her painting a nude model, was rejected by the Academy and called vulgar by a critic when it was shown elsewhere; after her death it was bought by the National Portrait Gallery. Exhibition labels and Academy records are often the best evidence of when a picture was painted and first shown.
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