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Winifred Knights
(1899 - 1947)
Lineholt Farmhouse
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Winifred Knights (1899 - 1947)
Size:
Height – 12cm
Width – 14cm
Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, Winifred Knights, Lund Humphries 2016
Exhibited: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2016
This is a portrait of Arnold Mason, who was at the time engaged to Winifred Knights. It is thought to be a study for The Deluge, and Mason appears in the final work in complete profile, on the left-hand side of the composition.
In 1920, Winifred Knights won the Rome Scholarship in Decorative Painting, considered at the time to be the highest distinction of its kind in the Empire’. Her winning entry, The Deluge, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in February 1921 to wide-spread critical acclaim, and Winifred Knights, the first woman to win the scholarship and nine years younger than the three other finalists, was declared to be a genius’.
The Scholarship rules dictated that the painting was produced in oil or tempera, together with an accompanying cartoon, both of which were to be executed in eight weeks. Winifred Knights commenced work on July 5th, 1920, and despite losing time due to a bout of tonsillitis, she was judged the unanimous winner.
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.
