Art: Derbyshire Dame

Why modern England does not produce great painters was partly explained by England’s greatest living woman painter this week when Dame Laura Knight, first and only full-fledged female member of the Royal Academy, published her autobiography in the U. S.*

Laura Johnson was born into a family of hard, violent Derbyshire folk who prospered in its lace industry. The women of Laura’s family uniformly felt profound contempt for their husbands, and she grew up in a household of six women and an uncle. Her bitter great-grandmother, hearing of her husband’s death, tried to cross England in time to slap his dead face before he was buried. Her mother’s marriage, writes the daughter, was “an unhappy one,” and when her father died soon after Laura’s birth, everybody said, “It is for the best.” A mustachioed aunt ran a lace factory at St. Quentin, France, while her pusillanimous husband got drunk and cried for money. Laura, however, admired her bachelor uncle and some of his friends, though the uncle presently put the family’s Nottingham lace factory into bankruptcy.

Laura’s mother taught the girl that the two most important things in life were to paint and to be independent. Laura tried to draw from early childhood. Sent to her aunt’s in St. Quentin, she copied portraits in the illustrated magazines of French generals and statesmen. Back in Nottingham at the Art School, she was barred from life classes because they were open only to men, was put to drawing from plaster casts. The local burghers invariably called her worst pictures masterpieces, tried to get her to do their portraits.Self-supporting in Nottingham, she gave private art lessons, got a few small commissions, finally a scholarship. Her ally through these hard years was a young man several years ahead of her in the Nottingham Art School, as poor and as able as she. His name was Harold Knight, and in 1903 she married him. Same year she got her first picture accepted by the Royal Academy, sold it at once. After that her struggles were practically over.

Nottingham’s famed Goose Fair, a combination of autumn market, circus and racetrack, left the happiest childhood impression on Laura, had much to do with her delighted discovery of circus subjects soon after the War. She traveled with circuses, became the firm friend ofEngland’s late great clown, Whimsical Walker, and a dappled grey circus horse named Hassan, both of whom she repeatedly painted. Of the circus she says: “I love the freedom of it all. . . . The flapping of canvas is like the sound of gunshot— there’s nothing in the world to compare with it all. . . . The perfection of the control of the human body is miraculous— that is an important point. . . . The circus is a whole little world in itself.”

In 1927 the Royal Academy elected her an associate member and one year later, Husband Harold. As she points out in Oil Paint and Grease Paint, the late Annie Louisa Swynnerton deserves the reputation Laura Knight has been given of being the first woman elected to the Academy since the 18th Century. In 1929 Laura Knight was made a Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

Dame Laura’s book shows off her direct, robust sincerity. A product of her childhood, she tells a story of much violence, dismisses in a sentence a circus fire in which “a sailor and nine Boy Scouts were burned alive.” Her paintings have the quality her childhood instructors tried in vain to cure her of—a heavy hand. Her drawing is strong. The point of her pictures is always heartily obvious. Now at 59, she is a highly respectable figure in the British art world with her personal trademarks of a sombrero and velvet jacket, her hair in two buns over the ears.

*OIL PAINT AND GREASE PAINT—Macmillan ($5).