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Winifred Knights
(1899 - 1947)
Lineholt Farmhouse
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Winifred Knights (1899 - 1947)
Size:
Height – 26cm
Width – 22.2cm
Gill was the first Rome Scholar in Decorative Painting. He completed his stay at the British School in Rome in 1921 – shortly before Knights, the first woman to win the scholarship, arrived as his successor at the end of 1920. They fell in love.
Each produced a pencil portrait of the other:
“I couldn’t get [the newspaper] away from Gill; he had his nose glued to it for a whole morning, so I drew him – not at all a bad drawing”
Letter to Mother, 19th May 1921
Gill included Knights in the same pose as his pencil portrait of her in his British School at Rome masterpiece Allegory, (completed in May 1921):
Colin Gill and Winifred Knights at The British School at Rome.
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.
