Dame Laura Knight, 1877-1969

Epsom Downs

Oil on canvas, about 1938

Laura Knight was taught to draw by her mother before entering Nottingham School of Art aged thirteen. The first woman to become a member of the Royal Academy since Angelica Kauffman in 1768, Knight was an official War Artist and painted the Nuremburg Trials of the Nazis. A central figure in the Newlyn School, her art was Post-Impressionist and figurative. She painted outdoors and her experiments lay with her choice of subject matter: women munitions workers, ballet dancers, the black patients and nurses in a racially-segregated hospital in 1920s Baltimore and fortune-tellers in the fairground at the racecourse at Epsom. A quietly flamboyant bohemian, Knight borrowed a Rolls Royce to travel to Epsom. The bustle of the fair is freely painted and a sense of movement is generated by the road forking left and right in the middle distance.

Purchased, 1939.