WHY DID LAURA KNIGHT BECOME SO FAMOUS?

Laura Knight, born in Nottingham in 1877, died in London in 1970 at the age of 93. From a difficult and impoverished background she rose to become the first woman ever elected to the Royal Academy and the first painter made a Dame. She was a War Artist in both world wars and wrote two volumes of autobiography. Knight belonged to a generation which saw women vote, sit in Parliament, and gain entry to formerly male professions such as medicine and the law. By her determination and ceaseless hard work, she became something of a spokesperson for the self-made woman of the age. The lecture traces her long and highly varied career from the artist communities of Staithes and Newlyn to affluent St John’s Wood in London and her wartime refuge in Malvern. Sustained by her great long-lasting friendships with many of the leading artists, performers and writers of her time, Alfred Munnings, George Bernard Shaw, Tamara Karsavina and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, she was one of the great figures of twentieth-century British culture.

Timothy Wilcox

Timothy Wilcox is a writer, lecturer and exhibition curator with special interests in British art, in landscape and in watercolour painting. He was a museum curator in the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings following positions at the V&A, in Liverpool and Hove. As a freelance curator and lecturer since 1997, he has organised exhibitions on Laura Knight, Hilda Carline, John Sell Cotman and John Constable, at venues including Tate, The Lowry, the Wordsworth Trust and Dulwich Picture Gallery. He contributes regularly to the educational programmes at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and lectures at museums and galleries in Britain, Europe and the USA.