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Winifred Knights (1899 - 1947)
Ink on paper, 8 x 6 1/8 in. (20 x 15.5 cm.)
(9 7/8 x 8 1/16 in. (25 x 20.5 cm.) framed)
Size:
Height – 20cm x Width – 15.5cm
At the start of her art training Knights considered a career as an illustrator. Presenting herself as the central protagonist, and selecting models from her inner circle, she was greatly drawn to themes showing female independence, strength and courage, such as Rossetti’s Goblin Market. The conflict between female self-empowerment and subjugation was a recurrent theme, explored through women’s relationship to the natural world, to working communities, to marriage, motherhood and death.
Winifred Knights, 1916
As a Slade student, Knights cultivated a dress style based on purity and simplicity, in hand-spun and hand-woven cloth, combining elements drawn from Renaissance painting and “aesthetic dress” to create a compelling statement of feminine artistic identity. In Italy, she adopted a version of Italian peasant costume, subsequently retained all her life, consisting of ankle-length skirts of plain or checked cloth, coral necklaces and a broad-brimmed hat or headscarf.
Admired for her striking looks, Knights was portrayed by numerous painters and sculptors during her lifetime, including David Evans, Colin Gill, Alfred Hardiman, Arnold Mason, Ambrose McEvoy, Thomas Monnington and Mary Potter. In the major paintings produced by Gill and Monnington during their Scholarships at the British School at Rome, Knights is the principle figure and main source of inspiration. the Leonardo da Vinci-inspired hairstyle that became an essential characteristic of her artistic identity.
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Winifred Knights was born in Streatham, London in 1899. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (1915’17, 1918’20 and 1926’27) . In 1919 she jointly won the Slade Summer Composition Competition with A Scene in a Village Street with Mill-Hands Conversing. In 1920, she became the first woman to win the Scholarship in Decorative Painting awarded by the British School at Rome. She remained in Italy until December 1925, marrying fellow Rome Scholar Thomas Monnington (1902’1976) in April 1924. On her return to England, Knights received a commission to paint an altarpiece for the Milner Memorial Chapel in Canterbury. A major commission for the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, on which she had been working for five years, remained unconcluded at her early death, aged 47.
Throughout her life, Winifred Knights produced work through which she explored women’s autonomy. Presenting herself as the central protagonist, and selecting models from her inner circle, she rewrote and reinterpreted fairy tale and legend, biblical narrative and pagan mythology. She was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2016.