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Lot Essay
In 1907 Harold and Laura Knight moved from Staithes in Yorkshire to Newlyn on the Cornish coast, joining a group of artists, including Stanhope Forbes and Walter Langley, who had been attracted by the timeless ways of this fishing village, the rugged landscape and extraordinary light. ‘Inspired by the beauty and light of West Cornwall, encouraged by the support of fellow artists, and for the first time enjoying an active social life, Laura was able to live every moment to the full. Her art blossomed, showing a greater awareness of light, the use of bright colour and freer, more vigorous brushwork’ (C. Fox, Dame Laura Knight, 1988, p. 25). Over the next decade Knight established herself as a painter of sunlight and shadows with a series of airy, radiant paintings of women and children beside the sea.
In the Sun, Newlyn was made around 1909, and is a distillation of a hot, carefree Edwardian summer. The scene is taken from Paul Hill above Beer House, looking down on the old pier, with Newlyn Bay and Penzance in the distance. Knight captures the rich green of the landscape ruffled by the sea breeze and the fascinating, changing turquoise of the water. The Knights had taken lodgings in the village of Paul with the cheerful, eccentric Mrs Beer, who owned the Penzer House guest house; from their rooms ‘the whole stretch of the bay could be seen and grey Penzance transformed by the changing effects of light into a pearly city, the line of hills beyond the coast, the sweep of the Lizard Arm and, at night, the wink of the lighthouse’ (Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint, 1936, p. 165).
This painting is a fruit of Knight’s seminal years in Newlyn, when, as she wrote in her autobiography, ‘an ebullient vitality made me want to paint the whole world and say how glorious it was to be young and strong and able to splash with paint on canvas any old thing one saw, without stint of materials or oneself, the result of a year or two of vigour and enjoyment’ (Oil Paint and Grease Paint, p. 165). In 1909 Knight exhibited at the Royal Academy her first important Newlyn painting, The Beach (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne), which likewise has the theme of local children enjoying the summer holiday and a similar focus on the qualities of dazzling light and shade. The children in The Beach are almost certainly the same models who posed for In the Sun, Newlyn and Flying a Kite (National Gallery of South Africa, Cape Town), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1910 with The Boys (Johannesburg Art Gallery).
Both Laura and Harold Knight established their reputation with works from their first years in Newlyn. Among Laura’s admirers was Alfred Munnings, who joined them (somewhat to Harold’s discomfiture) as a lodger at Mrs Beer’s. Munnings, a powerful personality, gave Laura Knight the confidence to paint with greater bravura, while paying homage to her ground-breaking experimentation: ‘It was real sunlight that she represented’. In the Sun, Newlyn fully vindicates his judgement.
This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the work of Dame Laura Knight currently being prepared by R John Croft FCA, the artist’s great-nephew.
In the Sun, Newlyn was made around 1909, and is a distillation of a hot, carefree Edwardian summer. The scene is taken from Paul Hill above Beer House, looking down on the old pier, with Newlyn Bay and Penzance in the distance. Knight captures the rich green of the landscape ruffled by the sea breeze and the fascinating, changing turquoise of the water. The Knights had taken lodgings in the village of Paul with the cheerful, eccentric Mrs Beer, who owned the Penzer House guest house; from their rooms ‘the whole stretch of the bay could be seen and grey Penzance transformed by the changing effects of light into a pearly city, the line of hills beyond the coast, the sweep of the Lizard Arm and, at night, the wink of the lighthouse’ (Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint, 1936, p. 165).
This painting is a fruit of Knight’s seminal years in Newlyn, when, as she wrote in her autobiography, ‘an ebullient vitality made me want to paint the whole world and say how glorious it was to be young and strong and able to splash with paint on canvas any old thing one saw, without stint of materials or oneself, the result of a year or two of vigour and enjoyment’ (Oil Paint and Grease Paint, p. 165). In 1909 Knight exhibited at the Royal Academy her first important Newlyn painting, The Beach (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne), which likewise has the theme of local children enjoying the summer holiday and a similar focus on the qualities of dazzling light and shade. The children in The Beach are almost certainly the same models who posed for In the Sun, Newlyn and Flying a Kite (National Gallery of South Africa, Cape Town), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1910 with The Boys (Johannesburg Art Gallery).
Both Laura and Harold Knight established their reputation with works from their first years in Newlyn. Among Laura’s admirers was Alfred Munnings, who joined them (somewhat to Harold’s discomfiture) as a lodger at Mrs Beer’s. Munnings, a powerful personality, gave Laura Knight the confidence to paint with greater bravura, while paying homage to her ground-breaking experimentation: ‘It was real sunlight that she represented’. In the Sun, Newlyn fully vindicates his judgement.
This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the work of Dame Laura Knight currently being prepared by R John Croft FCA, the artist’s great-nephew.