Dame Laura Knight DBE RA (1877–1970) was one of the most celebrated and pioneering British artists of the twentieth century. Working across painting, drawing and printmaking, she built an exceptionally varied career around the close observation of life: from fishing communities and Cornish landscapes to ballet dancers, circus performers, Romani families, wartime workers and the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials.
Born Laura Johnson in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, Knight entered Nottingham School of Art at the age of thirteen. At the time, female students were prohibited from working directly from the nude model and were instead expected to study from casts and existing drawings. These restrictions helped shape her determination to establish women’s authority as artists and observers. Her groundbreaking Self Portrait with Nude of 1913 depicts Knight painting the artist and model Ella Naper, boldly placing a woman in the traditionally male roles of both artist and viewer.
After spending several years among the artists’ community at Staithes in Yorkshire, Laura and her husband, the painter Harold Knight, moved to Cornwall in 1907. There they became associated with the Newlyn School and the Lamorna group. Working outdoors, Knight developed a lighter palette and an increasingly confident approach to colour, movement and the human figure.
Following the First World War, Knight’s attention turned towards the theatre, ballet and circus. Granted unusual access behind the scenes, she depicted performers during rehearsals and moments of preparation, capturing the discipline and labour concealed behind public spectacle.
Knight was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1927 and, in 1936, became its first female Royal Academician since the institution’s two female founding members, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser. She was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1929. During the Second World War, she worked as an official war artist, producing memorable images of women undertaking skilled industrial and military work. In 1946, she attended the Nuremberg Trials, recording proceedings in drawings and in her monumental painting The Nuremberg Trial. In 1965, she became the first woman to be given a major retrospective at the Royal Academy.
Knight’s work is held in numerous national collections, including Tate, the Royal Academy of Arts, the National Portrait Gallery and Imperial War Museums. Her importance extends beyond these distinctions: through both her work and her example, she challenged the limits placed upon women’s artistic education, professional recognition and freedom of subject.
Laura Knight also holds a particular significance for Candida Stevens Gallery. Her example inspired the gallery’s first London exhibition, which celebrated the comparative freedom enjoyed by women artists today while acknowledging the generations whose persistence made that freedom possible.