Dame Laura Knight(1877–1970)

Laura Johnson was born at Long Eaton on the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border on 4 August 1877, daughter of a Nottinghamshire lace-pattern designer. She was schooled in Nottingham and won a Nottingham Borough Council art scholarship to the Nottingham School of Art at thirteen on a portfolio submitted on her mother's recommendation.

Admitted to the senior life-drawing class at fourteen, she met Harold Knight, the fellow student two years older who became her husband. They married in 1903, took the North Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes as their working base, and produced through the Staithes-and-Whitby coastal-community years the fishing-village and coastal-scene paintings that established her at the Royal Academy summer exhibitions of the early 1900s.

She moved with Harold to Cornwall in 1907 and spent twelve years at the artists' colony at Newlyn and Lamorna, the productive register of her career: the Cornish cliff-and-cove landscape, the women of the Newlyn fishing community, and the circus-and-ballet rehearsal scenes that became her trademark. Her 1913 Self-Portrait with Nude put the female-painter-painting-the-female-nude relationship at the centre of the canvas, a subject no senior Royal-Academician had attempted; rejected by the Academy in its day, it now hangs as a landmark of the period.

She and Harold moved to London in 1919. She was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1927, created DBE in 1929, and on 28 April 1936 became the first woman ever elected a full Royal Academician in the Academy's hundred-and-sixty-eight-year history. Through the 1920s and 1930s she painted the Bertram Mills Circus and Russian Ballet rehearsal scenes and the gypsy-encampment paintings that the public knew her by.

She was an Official War Artist from 1939, painting the women's auxiliary services, the air-raid-shelter scenes of the London Underground and the women on the munitions production lines. In November 1945, at sixty-eight, the Ministry of Information sent her to Nuremberg to record the International Military Tribunal; she sketched the proceedings from the press box across the winter and produced The Nuremberg Trial (1946), now at the Imperial War Museum, the English-art record of the trial. She worked into her eighties and died at her Chelsea studio on 7 July 1970, ninety-two years old. The Knight name, the Old English cniht, she carried into the first-female-Royal-Academician position in the Academy's history.