The Knight Who Was Made a Dame

Laura Knight's paintings are full of strong women -- in many senses of the word. And though to us in the early 21st century, many of her pictures may appear at first glance somewhat conventional, Knight was an artist who 100 or so years ago not only broke sharply with convention, including in her subject matter, but who also broke through the glass ceiling to reach the very top of her male-dominated profession. 

Laura Knight: A Panoramic View at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes is a splendid, thoroughly enjoyable, often surprising and rather uplifting exhibition. The curators have brought together more than 160 works from all corners of the country -- from Bolton and Blackpool, Perth and Dundee, Falmouth and Canterbury, from some towns that we didn't even realise had art galleries. 

Knight was born in 1877, and when she trained as an artist, she wasn't allowed to join life-drawing classes because she was a woman. But change was rapid in the 20th century, and in the mid-1930s, Knight, who'd already been made a dame, became the first woman to be elected a full member of the Royal Academy. 

But perhaps nothing changed the status of women as much as war, so let's start with the picture that sums that all up. It's Britain's own real-life Rosie the Riveter, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring, the heroine of the home front.

Loftus was an outstanding worker in the Royal Ordnance factory at Newport in South Wales, doing a job that required absolute precision on a part for a Bofors anti-aircraft gun. Knight created this painting in a socialist-realist style on site over a three-week period as Loftus continued working, the focus from the reflected light very much on Ruby's concentration on her task. Women form the bulk of the workers in the background too; there's only one man to be seen. This painting was voted picture of the year at the 1943 Royal Academy exhibition -- a grainy film at the MK Gallery follows Knight and Loftus as they go to see it at the RA together -- and it was reproduced as a morale-boosting poster for factories. 
 

Laura Johnson, as she was born, attended Nottingham Art School from the age of 13. Constrained by the prudish Victorian convention that meant women students were segregated from men and had to learn from plaster casts and not life models, she was nonetheless an assiduous worker and her talent, visible in this charcoal portrait made when she was about 16, quickly won her prizes. 

The first room of this show records her early career in Staithes on the North Yorkshire coast, with pictures of fisherfolk and beach life that show the influences of Impressionism and Dutch paintings of domestic scenes, as well as work made in Cornwall that has touches of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Post-Impressionists. It's as if she was searching for a style of her own, and around the time of World War I she seems to have hit on the first of a series of genres that are quite distinctive.

These atmospheric and enigmatic paintings depict women sitting or standing by the sea, turned away from the viewer. There are no men; if there are men in these women's thoughts, they may be far away across the waters, fighting, or fishing, or transporting vital goods. The cliffs look precipitous, but the sea tends to be fairly calm, and the weather doesn't generally seem threatening. The Dark Pool is among the brighter of these pictures, with the figure in the orangey-red dress cutting across the horizon. 

Rebelling against the conservative art establishment, she also began to paint female nudes along the coast at Newlyn about this time. She wrote of wanting "to paint the whole world and say how glorious it was to be young and strong." Some locals complained to the landowner, but he stuck up for the artist.  

One picture that's unfortunately missing from this show is perhaps Laura Knight's best-known work, her 1913 self-portrait painting a nude model, from the National Portrait Gallery. 

Quite successful now, Knight and her husband Harold moved from Cornwall to London, where she became an enthusiast for the ballet and developed another genre she made her own: the backstage view. Dancers -- and theatre actors as well -- are seen dressing, applying their make-up, gathering their thoughts before going on stage, or perhaps just taking a moment out to calm the nerves. Here in The Dressing Room at Drury Lane, one of the dancers casts a weary glance back at the artist. 

One of the most striking of these images doesn't feature an actual dancer, but one of Knight's favourite models, Eileen Mayo, in the guise of a ballerina getting ready for her performance in No 1 Dressing Room. Mayo is startlingly posed bare-breasted, doing her hair in the mirror on the dressing table. But the reflection in the mirror is that of the seamstress, her eyes downcast as she works on the ballerina's dress. 

"If Laura Knight were only a man she would probably be the next president of the Royal Academy," the Daily Express wrote in 1929. "Mrs Laura Knight does not paint 'pretties'. Her figures are living, human beings of solid flesh and form." 

That quote is borne out in another area of the entertainment world that appealed to Knight: the circus. We approached this subject matter somewhat tentatively, not expecting to find it very interesting. But the works are absolutely fascinating, and in a mixture of styles. The most curious are a couple of almost magical-realist paintings featuring a gamut of circus performers in action, such as Charivari. 

The strong-woman theme is very much evident in Ella Ardelty on the High Trapeze, with the muscular and daring performer's gravity-defying exertions emphasised by her unusual position towards the top of the canvas.

But the weirdness and wonderfulness of the circus is brought out fully in pictures of the artistes backstage. Three Clowns in their business attire, complete with props, are holding what appears to be a strategy discussion before going on, their faces utterly serious. 

It's a decade too early for them to be talking about the war, but the conflict was to change Knight's output significantly. Ruby Loftus was not the only female to feature prominently in Knight's canvases, commissions for which she often had to plead for more money from the authorities.

This painting commemorates Sergeant Helen Turner and Corporal Elspeth Henderson, both awarded the Military Medal for bravery in 1940. When the building they were working in at Biggin Hill was hit in a bombing raid, they carried on operating the phones until it caught fire and they were ordered to leave.  

They look to be reluctant sitters. "We've got better things to do than be posing for an artist," you imagine them thinking. "Don't you know there's a war on?"

There are some fairly monumental canvases from the war years on show here. These paintings are incredibly detailed, with a distinct sense of three-dimensionality. The barrage balloons that were flown to keep enemy aircraft at bay feature in a couple, and this picture depicts the work of one of the teams of women who began operating the balloons from 1941.    

Knight went to Nuremberg after the war as an official artist covering the war-crimes trials, and she found the experience harrowing. In the aftermath, she took comfort in landscapes, spending much time in the Malvern Hills. 

Sundown, started during the war, was completed in 1947. She wrote of the sunset providing a realisation "of size, of the infinite; and with it came a type of philosophy of the greatest comfort."  

It reminded us of the sort of English landscape painted by John Nash as he sought to purge the memories of his experiences in the trenches in the previous war; that Nash show, which we saw in Eastbourne over the summer, can now be viewed in Compton Verney. 

This wide-ranging Laura Knight exhibition takes in several other aspects of her output, and if you want to see examples of her work on ceramics with Clarice Cliff or her pictures of the Gypsy community before World War II, those are just extra reasons to get along to Milton Keynes.

But let's end with one of those strong women she specialised in, and in this case a professional strongwoman.   

Joan Rhodes was known as the Iron Girl in a Velvet Glove and her act included bending iron bars. Knight, though, admired her feminine beauty, so at odds with her strength: "Although she could tear a telephone book in half by a turn of the wrist.... she had no bulgy muscles. Her slim bodily form was perfection." 

This exhibition at the MK Gallery may not quite be perfection, but it's still one of the best shows we've seen this year. 

Practicalities

Laura Knight: A Panoramic View is on at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes until February 20. Opening hours are 1000 to 1700 Tuesday to Sunday. Allow yourself up to two hours to view this extensive exhibition. As we've noted before, tickets at this venue are exceptionally good value: £10.45 including a Gift Aid donation, £9.50 without. You need to book timed entry online here. 

The gallery is at 900 Midsummer Boulevard in the town's theatre district. There are plenty of trains from London Euston to Milton Keynes Central, with fast services taking 30-40 minutes, and with a railcard, a day return can cost not much more than £10. Come out of the station entrance and walk straight ahead for just over 2 kilometres, and you'll come to the gallery. Buses are also available. Oh, and the MK Gallery café isn't bad....

Images

Laura Knight, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring, 1943, IWM. Photo courtesy IWM. © Crown Copyright. IWM. All Rights Reserved
Laura Knight, Study of a Girl aka Sarah, c. 1893, private collection. Photo courtesy John Mitchell Fine Paintings. © Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2021. All Rights Reserved
Laura Knight, The Dark Pool, 1914, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle
Laura Knight, The Dressing Room at Drury Lane, 1922. Photo © The Atkinson, Lord Street, Southport. © Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2021. All Rights Reserved

Laura Knight, Ella Ardelty on the High Trapeze, undated, private collection. Photo courtesy Sotheby's. © Reproduced with permission of The Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2021. All Rights Reserved

Laura Knight, Three Clowns, 1930, Leicester Museums and Galleries

Laura Knight, Assistant Section Leader Elspeth Henderson, MM, and Sergeant Helen Turner, MM, WAAF, 1941, Royal United Services Institute

Laura Knight, A Balloon Site, Coventry, 1943, Oil on canvas, IWM. Photo courtesy IWM. © Crown Copyright. IWM. All Rights Reserved

Laura Knight, Sundown, 1940-47, Wolverhampton Art Gallery

Laura Knight, Joan Rhodes, 1955, Royal Academy, London