Women’s Work

Provenance:

Private Collection, Florida

Lot Note:

Dame Laura Knight today is admired for her lively depictions of everyday life and her virtuoso command of drawing. Born in Derby, she studied at the Nottingham School of Art, where she met the painter Harold Knight, whom she later married. In 1936 she became the first woman elected to full membership of the Royal Academy since its founding in the eighteenth century, and in 1929 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. 

Knight worked across a wide range of media, but works on paper played a central role throughout her career. Whether executed in charcoal, pencil, watercolor, or pastel, these works demonstrate the immediacy and technical assurance that underpinned her larger compositions. Often created from life, her drawings usually capture performers, dancers, or in this case circus artists - all marked by a remarkable sense of spontaneity and vitality.