Mary Ann Knight

[2] At the age of twenty-six she began to paint portraits in order to assist her parents, who had fallen upon hard times, and she received instruction in miniature work from Andrew Plimer.

[3] She painted portraits from 1802 down to 1836, a period of thirty-four years, and a list of her works, extracted from her note-books, are appended in Williamson (1903)[2] She kept a very careful account of her earnings, and records that she made the sum of £5,171 9s.

[6] The success which Miss Knight obtained in her portraits of children appears to have been the result of her engaging charm, quiet soft voice, merry vivacious manner, and great kindliness of disposition.

It is certain that she was able to catch their arch and roguish expression, to represent them as real children, and to capture in her rapid and sketchy portraits excellent likenesses of the little ones with whom she was so popular.

[2] Her portraits are generally of large size, and as a rule pale, even somewhat washy in colour, but there are cases in which she has employed a dark and rich scheme of colouring (such as in the portraits of Lady Bagot and Lady Fanny Ponsonby belonging to the Plimer family), and in such instances she was very partial to the use of a rich purple, resembling the bloom of a grape.

According to Williamson, it is unfortunate that she was at times influenced by the affected custom of that period, which delighted to depict the children as angels, or in classical attire.

Had she confined herself exclusively to genuine portraiture she would have been far more successful, and there is no doubt that her best portraits are those in which she did not aim at any representation of allegorical allusion or classical detail, but was content to paint the child as he was, in a natural attitude.