Art: Grand Dame

Chicago’s Findlay Galleries played host last week to the warm, simple and true pictures of the world’s most distinguished woman painter, Dame Laura Knight. To a few, the pictures’ heartfelt realism had that musty look of the faraway and long ago; visitors were hard put to assess them by contemporary—and so often geometric —standards. One critic noted that Dame Laura painted like a man. Said she in London when she heard of it, “What man?” Another called her a “popular painter,” which roused her British ire the more: “Don’t call me popular. I paint what I see, and I don’t gild the truth.” The truth through her eyes could be seen in the show’s best canvas: a pain-racked image entitled Convalescent Gypsy. She had made no secret of the fact that her model died the day after she finished it.

Dame Laura has seen plenty in her 81 years—and has put it all down with faithful brush and oil. As a teen-age orphan, Laura Knight took over her mother’s art classes in Nottingham, blackening her toes so that the holes in her shoes would go unnoticed. At 25, she was living in Staithes, a fishing village on the Yorkshire coast, painting the grinding poverty and bold courage of North Sea fisherfolk. In her thirties and forties she was off traveling with the circus, camping with gypsies, setting up easels in the ring at Blackfriars, hanging over the stalls in Covent Garden, sleeping under tent flaps, recording on canvas her impressions of the entertainment world. At 51 she was named Dame Commander, British Empire. Seven years later Dame Laura became the third female in 200 years to crack the hallowed full membership of the Royal Academy of Art. When the British government wanted someone to record the evil and drama of the Nürnberg trials after World War II, it chose Dame Laura.

Growing old and a trifle gnarled, the grand dame of British art still paints every day in her London “workshop.” “It’s not grand enough to call a studio,” she insists, adding, rightly, that she is “not a great painter.” But, she says, “it’s not for lack of darned hard work. I never had more money than I needed. I am thankful to have known the facts and struggles of a common life.” Humility shines through Dame Laura’s art—and so does humanity.