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Winifred Knights
(1899 - 1947)
Lineholt Farmhouse
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Winifred Knights (1899 - 1947)
Size:
Height – 16cm
Width – 15cm
’Two nights ago, I stood and listened to a nightingale singing in a garden nearby it was delicious, quite near me in a tree overhead. I could have stayed for hours. Oh this is a wonderful place, I went to Lake Nomi again the fields are one mass of purple orchids and white Narcissi & pink cyclamen, & blue anemones. I never saw such wild flowers.’ (Letter from Winifred Knights to her mother, The British School, Valle Giulia, Sunday 17th April 1921.) This study, painted en plein air whilst Knights was in Italy, shows a bee orchid, possibly Ophrys Bertolonii, commonly known as Bertoloni’s Bee Orchid.
Knights drew flowers throughout her life. Her last last major painting, which was never completed, The Flight into Egypt, was set along a bank of bluebells and narcissi.
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.
