Dame Laura Knight(1877–1970)

Laura Johnson was born on 4 August 1877 at the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border town of Long Eaton, third daughter of Charles Johnson, a Long Eaton lace-pattern designer of substantial commercial standing in the Nottinghamshire lace industry, and Charlotte Bates. The household collapsed when Laura was three. Charles Johnson's lace-design business failed on the post-1879 industrial recession; he abandoned the family for America in 1880 and was never heard from again. The mother moved the three girls into a two-room rented apartment in central Nottingham and supported them through laundry-work and piecework-needlework. Laura was schooled at the local Nottingham Higher-Grade Girls' School from five and at the Nottingham School of Art from thirteen on a Nottingham Borough Council art scholarship she had won on the strength of a portfolio submitted on her mother's recommendation. The mother died of tuberculosis when Laura was fifteen; the three girls were raised through to adulthood by aunts in the Long Eaton family network.

She was admitted to the life-drawing class at the Nottingham School of Art at fourteen (the second-youngest student ever admitted to the Nottingham senior life class), met Harold Knight, the fellow student two years older than her who would become her husband, on the first day of her admission. The Nottingham years gave her the technical foundation of her drawing practice and the personal partnership that ran across her adult life. She and Harold married in June 1903 at the Long Eaton parish church, took the Northamptonshire fishing village of Staithes on the North Yorkshire coast as their working artistic base, and produced through the Staithes-and-Whitby coastal-fishing-community period (1898 to 1907) the foundation Knight body of fishing-village and coastal-scene paintings that established her reputation at the Royal Academy summer exhibitions of the early 1900s.

She moved with Harold to Cornwall in 1907 at thirty and lived for the next twelve years at the artistic colony at Newlyn and Lamorna on the western tip of the Penwith peninsula. The Newlyn-Lamorna period (1907 to 1919) was the productive register of her career. The Newlyn artists' colony, founded in the 1880s by Stanhope Forbes on the French-Brittany-Pont-Aven model, ran the foundational late-Victorian English plein-air landscape-and-genre-painting practice on the Cornish coast; she and Harold integrated into the colony immediately on arrival and produced through the period a substantial body of paintings on the Cornish-cliff-and-cove landscape, the working-class women of the small Newlyn fishing community, and the small private circus-and-ballet-rehearsal genre scenes that became her trademark subject of the post-war period. The 1913 *Self-Portrait with Nude*, painted at the small Newlyn studio, was the foundational image of her career: a full-length self-portrait of the artist at the easel, painting a nude female model in the room beyond, in a composition that put the female-painter-painting-the-female-nude relationship at the centre of the canvas at a moment when no senior English Royal-Academician male painter had attempted the subject. The painting was rejected on the public-morality grounds for the 1913 Royal Academy summer exhibition and was not exhibited publicly until 1965.

She and Harold moved to London in 1919 and took a small studio at the Chelsea Studios on Glebe Place, off the King's Road. The post-1919 period was the register of her commercial and academic success: she was elected an Associate Member of the Royal Academy in 1927 (the second woman ever elected to ARA, after Annie Swynnerton in 1922), was created DBE in 1929 at fifty-two, and on 28 April 1936 was elected the first woman ever elected a full Royal Academician in the Academy's hundred and sixty-eight-year history. Across the 1920s and 1930s she produced the bulk of the genre-painting subject-matter that the public knew her by: the Bertram Mills Circus paintings, the Russian Ballet rehearsal scenes (she had been given small studio-access to Diaghilev's company at the Coliseum across the 1919 London season), and the gypsy-encampment paintings that ran on her summers spent in caravanning across the Midlands and Welsh borderlands.

She was commissioned as an Official War Artist by the Ministry of Information at the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and produced across the 1939 to 1945 period the war-art body of paintings on the women's-auxiliary services, the Coventry Cathedral bombing reconstruction site, the air-raid-shelter scenes of the London Underground stations, and the armaments-factory paintings of the women working the Sheffield-and-Coventry munitions production lines. The senior Ministry of Information commission of the post-war period sent her to Nuremberg in November 1945, at sixty-eight, to attend the International Military Tribunal of the Nazi-leadership trial and to produce a official painting of the proceedings. She spent the next four months at Nuremberg, sketching from the press-box that the Tribunal had provided to the visiting press correspondents, and produced on the basis of the Nuremberg sketches the painting *The Nuremberg Trial* (1946), now at the Imperial War Museum, London. The painting (a architectural-perspective view of the trial chamber, with Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop and the other defendants in the dock at the centre of the small canvas) was the English-art-historical record of the Nuremberg proceedings. She continued working through her late seventies and eighties; her last Royal Academy summer-exhibition submission was at the 1969 exhibition, eight months before her death at the Chelsea studio on 7 July 1970, at ninety-two. The Knight name in the English-side catalogue is the Old English *cniht*, the Anglo-Saxon youth or attendant compressed into the medieval English nobility-title that the patronymic surname reflects; she carried the Long Eaton lace-designer's daughter variant of it into the first-female-Royal-Academician position in the Academy's history.