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Laura Knight

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Artist

The Resume

    (August 4, 1877-July 7, 1970)
    Born in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, England, United Kingdom
    Birth name was Laura Johnson
    Painter, etcher, and engraver
    Notable works include 'The Beach' (1909), 'Self Portrait with Nude' (1918), 'Madonna of the Cotton Fields' (1927), 'Charivari, or the Grand Parade' (1929), Gypsy Splendour' (1939), and 'Nuremberg Trial, 1946' (1946)
    Named a Dame Commander of the British Empire (1929)

Why she might be annoying:

    She destroyed many of her early paintings and drawings, burning them to keep her studio warm.
    Kenneth Clark dismissed her paintings as 'commonplace.'
    While a member of the Royal Academy's selection committee, she and Augustus John got into a dispute over Wyndham Lewis' portrait of T.S. Eliot (she sided with the conservative majority in rejecting it for exhibition) that became so vehement that it resulted in John resigning from the Royal Academy in protest.

Why she might not be annoying:

    At age fifteen, she took over her mother's teaching duties at the Nottingham School of Art after her mother was diagnosed with cancer.
    She was married to fellow artist Harold Knight for 58 years.
    She was named an official war artist during World War II; her created several paintings designed to bolster female recruitment at ordinance factories.
    She was the first female artist elected to full membership of the Royal Academy since 1769 (1936) and the first to have a retrospective exhibition of her works at the Royal Academy (1965).

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying