Dame Laura Knight, RA, RWS

(British, 1877-1970)

A Little Mother

Footnotes

Provenance
Mr and Mrs George Roslington.
With MacConnal-Mason & Son Ltd., London.
Private collection (acquired from the above, 1999).

Exhibited
London, Leicester Galleries, Paintings and watercolours of Life and Landscape by Harold Knight and Laura Knight, 1907, no. 8.
London, Royal Watercolour Society, Summer Exhibition, 1909, no. 124.

This work is listed in the Laura Knight catalogue raisonné currently in preparation by Mr R. John Croft FCA, as cat. no. 0255.

Having been in Staithes since 1895, Laura Knight moved with her husband Harold to Newlyn in 1907; they would remain there until 1918. The couple were welcomed by Stanhope Forbes, and now found themselves in a thriving, jovial and exciting artist's colony. They soon became part of a wide social circle and became close friends with Sir Alfred James Munnings and Samuel John Lamorna Birch in particular.

Laura continued to paint en plein air as she had done in Staithes, and drew her inspiration from scenes she observed locally. Her watercolours of this period have an extraordinary warmth and glow. In A Little Mother, which was exhibited at The Leicester Galleries in 1907 (and also at The RWS Summer Exhibition in London in 1909), she has managed to capture an intimate moment, presumably between siblings, as they rest beside a path. The spontaneity and confidence of the brushstrokes in the foreground only serve to underline the serenity of the moment. The artist has used bodycolour to give weight to the clothing and add texture to the trees, bushes and grass. The viewer's eye is drawn to the loving glance of the girl by the intense red of the child's cap. The immediacy of the moment would suggest that this is a scene which Laura Knight had actually witnessed, rather than one drawn from her imagination.

A Little Mother is a wonderful, tender example of the artist's work from this early period and an interesting addition to the known canon of one of our most loved artists.