Winifred Knights: art in service of the vision of equality.

 'Self-portrait' by Winifred Knights.

I first consciously encountered Winifred Knights in 2016 when the Dulwich Picture Gallery hosted a wonderful exhibition. One of the benefits of such exhibitions is that they provide the occasion for the accompanying catalogue or monograph: a publisher can take the risk! The curator of that exhibition, Sacha Llewellyn, produced a highly sensitive, beautifully produced study, 'Winifred Knights' that I have been reading (and looking at). 

Her first love was people in nature, people engaged in the harmonious business of living within a traditional landscape. She was a product of that moment at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century when a recognition of what was being lost in industrialization and urbanization was coming to the fore; and, that recognition was balanced between a realistic appraisal/critique and a sepia-tinged nostalgia. 

One of the formative influences on her was Edward Carpenter, somewhat lost to time now, but in his day a remarkable force of political, social, and spiritual commentary and in many ways wholly contemporary - a vegetarian, a critic of consumption, an advocate for a more participative, decentralized democracy, a protagonist for gay rights; and, for sandals! The freeing of feet was meant to give one a greater connection to the earth and it is no accident that many of Knights' female figures especially (including her own, often self-portraits) go barefoot.

Her second love was Italy, not least because in the scales of 'progress' Italy remained both more traditional and agrarian than England. She was the first woman to win an art scholarship to the British School in Rome and spent four years there in the 1920s absorbing people and landscape and slowly transforming these experiences into art. It was a love already seeded by a third one namely the Italian artists of the Quattrocento whose influence of a deep, still, grave humanity, filled with light, is so evident in her paintings.

'The Santissima Trinity', 1924-30

A fourth, and final, love (since they probably ought to go in fours) was of women. Her aunt was a Fabian, a suffragette, a campaigner for women's equality, especially over pay and work, and a deep influence on Knights and is reflected in their prominence in virtually all her paintings whether in the field or at the mill gates or simply as protagonists whether at the time of the Flood in her most famous painting, 'The Deluge' or gathered around Christ at 'The Marriage Feast at Cana'. 

Surprisingly perhaps given the prominence of the Biblical theme in her output, including a commission for Canterbury Cathedral, Knights, like so many, had lost her faith in the First World War. It's pointless slaying, including of close relatives, and the thoughtless attempts of clergy to justify their deaths in a greater cause comprehensively trashed it for her.  However, she did retain a heightened, pantheistic sense of divine presence in nature and recognized the life-affirming, and challenging, nature of Christ as a moral exemplar. 

Finally, though she sadly died of a brain tumor in her late forties yet why, even then, such a comparatively small output, often too unfinished. One reason was driven by her meticulous slowness, a trait some, for better and worse, rested at the foot of her training at the Slade that put so much emphasis on developing skilled draughtsmanship.  Another was her unhappy experience with the Canterbury commission and the overbearing demands of her primary commissioner. 

But the principal reason appears to lie in a family tragedy. Her first child was stillborn and her second child, John, became her sole concern in an undoubtedly loving yet hauntingly overprotective way. During the Second World War, they literally became nomads moving across the country seeking elusive havens of calm,  compulsive behavior that may too reflect her underlying brain condition. Apart from a few sketches, the last ten years of her life from a creative point of view lay fallow. 

Ultimately, however, quality reigns, and what quality - a consistent abiding vision of human being dwelling at home in a nurturing natural world that challenges the viewer to its care and for securing an equality of dwelling between men and women, and an equalizing in the community of goods, material and spiritual.  As here in a village street, as Llewellyn suggests, discussing the possibility of equal pay. The woman in red talking, mostly the women listening!

'A Scene in a Village Street with Mill-hands Conversing', 1919.