A one-woman show

She was a brilliant observer of boxers, ballet dancers, gypsies, horses, coastlines and women at war. To overlook the vitality of Dame Laura Knight’s work is nothing short of snobbery, argues Ian Collins

- Ian Collins

IN recent decades, it has been a mark of art-world snobbery to rubbish Dame Laura Knight. The token woman at the top table of British painting for much of the 20th century was too versatile, prolific and popular; too workaday, too vulgar. Now, however—with the first major gallery survey since a Nottingham retrospective of 1970, which opened days after her death—we can see how cleverly she caught the character of her times in lucid paint and how deeply she has seeped into our consciousness.

When we think of a picture of blissful summer on the Cornish coast or of fairs and circuses, boxers and ballet dancers, gypsies, horses, theatres, dressing rooms, courtrooms and, most especially, women at work, we probably have a Knight painting in mind. She was a painter of immense empathy, shifting perspectives in a selfless focus on her varied subjects and forever hiding the titanic effort behind her stellar career. Her famous selfportrait, with face in profile and further obscured by an all-weather hat, celebrates the nude models she was not allowed to see until she could pay for them herself.

Portrait of an artist