Winifred Knights at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

Dulwich picture gallery is the oldest public gallery in Britain and this week I went there for the very first time.  I shall write more about the gallery another time but today I will write about Winifred Knights whose work they had on exhibition.

I had come across Winifred Knights for the first time at the Fighting History exhibition at the Tate Britain last year where they were showing probably her most famous work The Deluge (top left).  It is a decidedly odd painting what with the angular figures in modern dress and the strange flat perspective that was slightly renaissance like.  I was keen to see more of her work.

This is a very good exhibition.  Even if your not too keen on Knights' style (which I am not) they have displayed the process by we she arrives at the finished product with studies of figures, cartoons and preparatory sketches. Like all good artists Knights' was slightly narcissistic as can be evidenced by the numerous self portraits and the fact that she places herself in all of her portraits.  These self portraits and a photograph show her to be a striking slim dark hair women possessed of a very English kind of severe beauty.

She was also I highly proficient draftswomen as can be seen by the detailed and accurate pencil sketches that are numerously displayed.  Slightly prodigious in talent as well.  The first two sketches to the left were produced when she was 19.  That piercing gaze is a specialty of hers and I do wonder if it was as devastating in real life as in the portraits.  She was it would seem equally accomplished in her rendering of others often using her family members as subjects.

Feminism and sisterly love are strong themes in all her work.  As is religion.   One picture that struck me is the illustration to the left of Little Miss Moffett.  The female figure is almost certainly Knights herself.  I like the strong compositional elements (the truncated shape of the frame is actually there and not an artifact of photography) but the pose of the figure very much reminds me of religious pictures of saints with the hand upraised in blessing.

Another sketch I really liked was this one of the cottage they rented in Wales (above). It is a solid sketch with excellent use of shadow.  A very effective technique is to use the lines of the bricks to donate more shaded area and to leave them off for areas in bright sunshine.

A technique of hers which is shown time and time again is to get people close to her, in the example above it is her mother and then lover, to pose for detailed studies.  These studies then make their way into the final picture.  You can see these familiar faces allot.  The blond gentleman in the tank top in The Deluge was her then lover.

She has an interesting approach to landscapes to.  These two to the left show the same angular approach with oddly flat features.  I find these interesting but not terribly aesthetically appealing. This is in fact a problem I have with most of Knights work.  I find it intellectually quite interesting but emotionally it leaves me cold.

So for example there is a piece called Santissima Trintia showing pilgrims on a route.  All the figures are women almost all of them asleep among hay stacks, all wearing simple one colour pastel shaded outfits.  There is the angular simplicity that is in all her pictures and the hay stacks are very suggestive but my reaction is only, that's interesting. 

I suppose the reason for this is Knights style as is shown very much in the picture bottom left of the Marriage is one that has never very much appealed to me.  It deliberately echoes the  religious frescoes of the renaissance period but with much more muted colours.  Those frescoes and their subject matter have never been my favorite genre of art.  Seeing them represented in this way is interesting but no more than that to me.

The main benefit to me of this exhibition was showing the production of a detailed high quality finished work from the early stages.