Strange Luck

Laura Knight (British, 1877-1970), Ella Ardelty on the High Trapeze. Oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm.

Conglomerat, 1943, Wassily Kandinsky

The Cruel Sea, Dame Laura Knight, 1967

Dame Laura Knight: Self-portrait with Model Ella Louise Naper, 1913.

After spending time in Paris, studying art under Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, then at Staithes on the North Yorkshire coast, Harold Knight moved in 1907, with Laura, to Newlyn, a fishing port in Cornwall, where they became part of the Newlyn School.

Knight studied at Nottingham School of Art under Wilson Foster. It was there that he met his future wife, Laura Johnson. Harold was a quiet character who is largely remembered, unfairly, as an adept but unexciting painter, while Laura (later Dame Laura) was flamboyant in both her life and art and achieved greater public renown.

The setting of this picture is Laura and Harold Knight’s cottage at Oakhill, Lamorna Gate. Harvey, along with Laura and Harold Knight, and Dod and Ernest Proctor, revived the fortunes of Newlyn painting in the early years of the twentieth-century. 

Picking Wild Flowers, Santa Cruz c.1927

Oil on canvas

At the Dressing Table

Fog in Stretford, Greater Manchester, November 24, 1958

Combinations (or The Combined Dalinian Phantasms; Ants, Keys, Nails), 1931, Salvador Dali

L’amore (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Izis Bidermanas,  Dora Maar, 1940 Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar with Green Fingernails

Hannah Sullivan, from Repeat Until Time: The Heraclitus Poem

Icon painting motifs, 1912, Natalia Goncharova

Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie