'Knight's portrait of the ballerina Barbara Bonner is a masterclass in flesh and taffeta,' says critic Rachel Cooke
Photograph: © Estate of Dame Laura Knight, 2013
One of a series of backstage portraits Laura Knight made of the dancers of the Ballets Russes 'in the nervy calm of their dressing rooms'.
Photograph: © Estate Of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA,2013
During the second world war Henderson and Turner were awarded the Military Medal for bravery for continuing to work on their switchboard even as their RAF base was bombed. 'It is the distinctive orange-red of their lipstick that catches the attention, all their pluck somehow captured in the careful application of a little Max Factor.'
Photograph: © Estate of Dame Laura Knight, 2013
Corporal Robins of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force was mentioned in the London Gazette, 20 December 1940: 'Corporal Robins was in a dug-out which received a direct hit during an intense enemy bombing raid. A number of men were killed and two seriously injured. Though dust and fumes filled the shelter, Corporal Robins immediately went to the assistance of the wounded and rendered first aid. While they were being removed from the demolished dug-out, she fetched a stretcher and stayed with the wounded until they were evacuated. She displayed courage and coolness of a very high order in a position of extreme danger.'
Photograph: Imperial War Museum, London
Knight would visit the racecourses at Epsom and Ascot where she painted Gypsy families using her chauffeur-driven Rolls as a makeshift studio.
Photograph: © Estate of Dame Laura Knight
Loftus was an outstanding factory worker who had learned complex engineering skills very quickly and Knight was commissioned to paint her at work in the factory. 'Yes, these paintings were propaganda. But somehow none of that matters when you stand before them,' says Cooke
Photograph: © Estae of Dame Laura Knight
Knight's self-portrait was painted in 1913, when she was 36. 'An ebullient vitality made me want to paint the whole world, and say how glorious it was to be young and strong and able to splash with paint on canvas,' she said.
Photograph: ©Estate of Dame Laura Knight
A 1967 photographic portrait by Madame Yevonde.
Photograph: © Yevonde Portrait Archive
Another of the wartime paintings Laura Knight made under the auspices of the WAAC. Photograph: Imperial War Museum, London
'Her gorgeously economical painting of a Gypsy called Gilderoy Smith has an intimate sexiness quite at odds with Knight's usual emphasis on beauty.' Photograph: Tate Images
At the age of 68, Knight persuaded the War Artists Advisory Committee to send her to Nuremburg to record the trials of Nazi war criminals, sketching Goering and the others from the press box. 'But when the time came to turn all this to paint,' says Cooke, 'she gave the courtroom only one visible wall, framing the dock instead with what she called “a mirage” of the ruined city – a fire even now burning among its rubble, the better, perhaps, to symbolise the impossibility of reparation.' Photograph: Imperial War Museum, London
In 1926 Knight travelled to Baltimore, Maryland, to join her husband, Harold Knight, who was working on a series of portraits in a hospital there. Knight chose as her subjects the black nurses and patients of the segregated wards.
Photograph: © Estate of Dame Laura Knight, 2013
