Art: First Lady

The Royal Academy included in 1768 (the year it was founded) two women members.** From that day to this no woman had been a segment of the sacred circle, until last week. Mrs. Laura Knight, “England’s greatest woman painter,” is the new Associate Academician.

At the Nottingham School of Art in 1903, Laura Johnson met Harold Knight. Soon they married and pursued together the trade of painting pictures. Together they passed from the stage of conscientious nature imitation to the artist’s inevitable urge for expression. Also, they struggled with relentless poverty, walking to London to see Mr. Knight’s first picture exhibited. Laura Knight sold her first picture (Mother and Child) to Edward Staff, A. R. A. Two years later another picture (A Cup of Tea by Mr. Knight) was sold. Next, they went to Holland where their work became dusky, grey, contemplative. Stubbornly refusing to paint pictures solely that they might sell, ana thereby condemn the creators to continue painting in the same mood, they went to Cornwall. On this stormy, cloudswept coast they discovered color, gaiety. Ten years passed and galleries began to buy their pictures. They won scholarships, medals, salon prizes. They are now represented in famed museums, chiefly English, all over the world. They live in St. John’s Wood, London, surrounded by tubes of color, squares of canvas. Harold Knight is a member of the Royal Portrait Society; now Laura Knight has added England’s deepest artistic tribute to the honor of the family.

She is shy about her work but seldom subtle in its execution. Daring arrays of color,learned on the Corn wall coast, are typical. Influenced as are almost all artists by modern tendencies, her feet remain resolutely on the ground. She was the first foreign woman chosen to serve on the Carnegie International Jury (1922). She loves working out-of-doors. She is 50. Through all her work runs a hard streak of sanity. She seems what many artists would hesitate to seem — completely wholesome. The dancing, the grace, the figure of Pavlowa are among her chief idola tries. She has amazing versatility — portraits, seascapes, nudes, pastoral landscapes, mothers. A. lesser idolatry of hers is prizefighting; one of her noted pictures shows two fisticuffers smashing each other about the ring.

There are 40 Royal Academicians — . the number fixed by George III when he granted them the “Instrument” of foundation. The following year a class of Associates was formed, and is now composed of an indefinite number of members with a minimum of 30. To this class Laura Knight belongs. Associates are elected by vote of both Academicians and Asso ciates, having been proposed and seconded by one of the former. They have all rights and privileges except an active part in the Academy ad ministration.

**Angelica Kauffman, Mrs. Mary Moser.