Dame Laura Knight

“Ruby Loftus Screwing a Beech Ring played into a key interest in Dame Laura’s work: the roles people play”

As British men were sent to the trenches in the 1940s, thousands of women were also conscripted, taking the men’s places as ambulance drivers, air-raid wardens and munitions factory workers. Suddenly, women were being called upon to plug the gap in the economy by taking up roles that were previously off limits to them.

To stir up urgent patriotism for this “war work”, the British government’s War Artists’ Advisory Committee commissioned artists’ help to get their message across. One of them was Dame Laura Knight, who came from little, yet went on to become one of the most well-known painters of mid-20th-century Britain.

In 1943, Knight set up her easel in the Royal Ordnance Factory in Newport to paint Ruby Loftus, a 20-year-old shows the worker looking unbothered as the sparks from the grinding metal parts throw light onto her face. Dotted in the background, we see a cohort of women just like Ruby, scrubbing, toiling, fixing machinery without glory, in the same blue overalls and hairnets. When it was complete, was turned into giant motivational posters to be displayed in factories. The purpose may have been propaganda, but the painting played into a key interest in Dame Laura’s work: the roles people play, and why they do them. Throughout her career, she was preoccupied with the backstage scenes of life – whether that was painting ballerinas in their dressing rooms, clowns scheming in rehearsal, or factory workers at their machines. “Everybody loved her, everybody took to her, because she was so interested in what they did, in their own right,” says Dame Laura’s biographer Dr Barbara C Morden. “As an artist, she was not precious, she admired everyone for what they did, and if they had a skill, she wanted to know about it.”