Grey Day at Epsom

After Carmo's Circus was forced to close down, Laura Knight began to look for new subjects for her pictures. Sir Alfred Munnings suggested that she visit Epsom races and she quickly adopted the racegoers and the wandering gypsy fortune tellers as her new subjects. She would be driven to the course by her friend Mr. Sully in his Rolls Royce, which he used to take bridal parties to church at the weekends, and set up her easel in the car so that she could paint out of the wind. The gypsy girls in their colourful costumes would pose in the doorway of the Rolls Royce and she would paint them with the racegoers beyond.
(see C. Fox, Dame Laura Knight, Oxford, 1988, p.85).