Dame Laura Knight DBE RA RWS (née Johnson; 4 August 1877 – 7 July 1970[1]) was an English artist who worked in oils, watercolours, etching, engraving and drypoint.

The family had relations in northern France who were also in the lace-making business and in 1889 Knight was sent to them with the intention that she would eventually study art at a Parisian atelier.

[6] Charlotte Johnson taught part-time at the Nottingham School of Art, and managed to have Knight enrolled as an "artisan student" there, paying no fees, aged just 13.

[8] At the School of Art, Laura met one of the most promising students, Harold Knight, who was then aged 17, and determined that the best method of learning was to copy his technique.

[9] In 1894, the couple visited Staithes on the Yorkshire coast, for a holiday and soon returned, accompanied by her sister Evangeline Agnes, to live and work there.

Staithes was too big a subject for an immature student, but working there I developed a visual memory which has stood me in good stead ever since.Laura Johnson and Harold Knight married in 1903 and made their first trip to the Netherlands in 1904.

Around Newlyn the Knights found themselves among a group of sociable and energetic artists, which appears to have allowed the more vivid and dynamic aspects of Laura's personality to come to the fore.

[12][13] Laura Knight spent the summer of 1908 working on the beaches at Newlyn making studies for her large painting of children in bright sunlight.

The Beach was shown at the Royal Academy in 1909, and was considered a great success, showing Laura painting in a more Impressionist style than she had displayed previously.

Although there was some resentment locally about this, the landowner, Colonel Paynter of Boskenna, was fully supportive and allowed Knight and the other artists a free rein.

[15] It is now only known from photographs but was considered to be a challenge to the then prevailing attitudes towards female nudity and aroused considerable controversy when included in a touring exhibition.

[2][19] In 2015, Simon Schama described the painting as a "masterpiece" and "incomparably, her greatest work, all at once conceptually complex, heroically independent, formally ingenious and lovingly sensual.

These were often depicted as relaxed summer scenes but some of her works, particularly those painted after the start of World War I, of a lone woman on a clifftop staring down at a turbulent sea had a darker undertone.

[21] In 1926, Harold Knight spent several months at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, in America, painting portrait commissions of surgeons.

Whilst in Baltimore Knight painted a nurse, Pearl Johnson, who took her to meetings and concerts of the early American civil rights movement.

[4] Knight took these paintings back to London with her and they feature in the Pathé newsreel produced to mark her election as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1927.

[12] Her Circus Folk exhibition, at the Alpine Club in 1930, was heavily criticised in art journals, but her paintings of more mundane subjects, such as domestic interiors and London streets, were highly praised.

[12] Notable works from this period include Susie and the Wash-basin (1927), Blue and Gold (1927), A Cottage Bedroom (1929) and Spring in St. John's Wood (1933).

[28] In 1934 Knight developed a series of circus designs for the Modern Art for the Table tableware range produced by Clarice Cliff.

[21][30] In 1929 Knight was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in June 1931 she received an honorary degree from St. Andrews University.

[1] A blue plaque at the Mount Pleasant Hotel on Belle Vue Terrace, Great Malvern, commemorates the time the Knights spent in the area.

They found much inspiration for their work in the Malvern Hills and in the surrounding countryside and by the start of World War Two the couple were living at Colwall in Herefordshire.

Knight hired two Suffolk Punch horses and a plough from a farmer and painted them outdoors in a cherry orchard on Averills' farm in Worcestershire.

The most notable war-time example of these is the composition, Betty and William Jacklin showing a mother and child, along with their pet rabbit and the Malvern countryside in background, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1942, beside In for Repairs.

[42] Knight explained this choice of composition in a letter to the War Artists' Advisory Committee:[43] In that ruined city death and destruction are ever present.

[2] After the war, Knight returned to her previous themes of the ballet, the circus and Gypsies, and continued to divide her time between London and Malvern.

A period of illness affected her work on this commission, and, despite Knight's repainting large parts of the canvas, the finished painting was not well received.

[2] Knight died on 7 July 1970, aged 92, three days before a large exhibition of her work opened at the Nottingham Castle Art Gallery and Museum.