Morning Sun

Kenneth McConkey (loc. cit), comments on interior painting in Cornwall, 'By 1913, a new vital area of subject matter opened up with a series of paintings of interiors. The conventional view of these pictures is that they derive from the curtailment of the painter's activities in time of war. Coastlines could not be represented since, it was thought, pictures of them could assist an invader. However, Harvey was undoubtedly aware of the sophisticated interiors of John Singer Sargent and John Lavery. He must also have seen the suave, stylish modernist rooms of Orpen, Clausen, Philip Connard and William Nicholson distilled in Newlyn in the work of Harold Knight. Knight's pictures often play what Whistler would have referred to as 'old games', that is, they play the game of balancing shapes and rectangles. Harold Knight's Morning Sun, for instance, shown at the Royal Academy in 1913, ostensibly a study of sunlight falling into a room in which a woman sits calmly reading, is in fact, strictly formalist. The figure and the back wall are ranged parallel to the plane of the picture and the window rectangle mimics the proportions of the canvas. The curtain is pulled to the right to balance the girl on the left and the clock in the upper left corner holds the composition taut. References to Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1, The Painter's Mother, 1872 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) would not be inappropriate here. Knight's woman even uses a footstool'.