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Winifred Knights
(1899 - 1947)
Lineholt Farmhouse
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Winifred Knights (1899 - 1947)
Size:
Height – 38.2cm
Width – 25.3cm
Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.179.
During Knights’ first few months at the British School, Colin Gill introduced her to
Rome and its historic sites and monuments, and together they attended fancy-dress
balls, the Russian Ballet and Opera, visited flower markets, ate in Gill’s favourite
restaurant at Trajan’s Forum and made trips to Tivoli and the seaside. In March 1921,
accompanied by Gill’s sister Marjory, they set off on a walking expedition in the
countryside north west of Rome, and then travelled by bus to Viterbo, Orvieto, Assisi,
Perugia and Florence. This portrait study likely dates from this expedition.
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.
