Laura Knight

Dame Laura Knight (née Johnson; 1877–1970) was an English painter and printmaker, and the most successful British woman artist of her era. From 1907 she worked in Cornwall — at Newlyn and then Lamorna — becoming a central figure of the Newlyn School alongside Alfred Munnings and Lamorna Birch, and painting the luminous, open-air scenes of beaches, bathers and cliffs for which she is best known. She was also celebrated for her pictures of the circus, the ballet (she was given backstage access to the Ballets Russes) and the theatre. Created a Dame in 1929, she became in 1936 the first woman elected to full membership of the Royal Academy since its founding members Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser in 1768. During the Second World War she was an official war artist — painting ‘Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring’ (1943) — and in 1946 recorded the Nuremberg war-crimes trials in ‘The Dock, Nuremberg’. In 1965 she became the first woman given a solo retrospective at the Royal Academy.