Review: Winifred Knights – Dulwich Picture Gallery

By Stuart King

Winifred Knights is a little recognised woman artist who was working in the early twentieth century. This lack of recognition is something this exhibition seeks to change by bringing together a major collection of her paintings.

Her talent can be seen early on with a number of fine drawings from the age of 17 produced during the First World War. Her aunt Millicent Murby, a member of the Fabian Women’s Group and campaigner for women’s rights appears in many of her drawings and paintings. It was Milicent who in 1917 introduced Winifred to Edward Carpenter, the utopian socialist and campaigner for gay rights. His ideas of returning to rural and craft based co-operative communities quickly became reflected in her paintings.

Winifred was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art under Henry Tonks and became a very precise draftswoman in her paintings. The exhibition, through displaying early sketches, drafts of paintings and full-scale cartoons, shows how her paintings were meticulously constructed and the enormous amount of work that went into them.

In 1919, with the country gripped by strikes, Winifred won the prestigious Summer Composition Prize at the Slade with “A Scene in a Village Street with Mill-hands Conversing”. Yet, as the picture label tells us, the title of this painting at the time was “Mill Hands on Strike” and it shows a female trade unionist in a red jacket addressing female workers at Roydon Mill, Essex. The trade unionist is an image of Milicent Murby, now an organiser of the Women’s Trade Union and campaigner for equal pay for women, while Winifred appears in the painting listening intently to the arguments.

Winifred Knights isn’t the only artist to have her picture titles changed for auction purposes, Lowry too painted pictures of Mill strikes, naming them as such – titles that were quickly changed by an art market that obviously finds the very word “strike” offensive!

In 1920, Winifred became the first woman to win the prestigious Scholarship in Decorative Painting awarded by the British School in Rome, which gave her a three year scholarship on £250 a year. Ten years younger than her male competitors she won with a picture involving a dramatic re-interpretation of the biblical theme, “The Deluge”.

In Italy Winifred produced a series of striking pictures, not just of Italian landscapes but large scale decorative paintings influence by the great fresco painters of the Italian Renaissance – painters like Giotto, Masaccio and Piero della Francesco. Her “Marriage at Cana” is perhaps the best painting in the exhibition and one you probably wont see again unless you go to New Zealand where it is owned.

Coming back from Italy, married to a fellow artist Monnington, Winifred struggled to maintain her painting in a largely male dominated art world while bringing up her son. Commissions were few between the wars but one in the exhibition done for Canterbury Cathedral “Scenes from the Life of Saint Martin of Tours” stands out.

Tragically Winifred Knights died suddenly of a brain tumour in 1947 aged only 48. Had she lived she would have undoubtedly contributed much more to British art and be better known today.

The exhibition is on until 18 September 2016