A one-woman show
IN recent decades, it has been a mark of art-world snobbery to rubbish Dame Laura Knight. The token woman at the top table of British painting for much of the 20th century was too versatile, prolific and popular; too workaday, too vulgar. Now, however—with the first major gallery survey since a Nottingham retrospective of 1970, which opened days after her death—we can see how cleverly she caught the character of her times in lucid paint and how deeply she has seeped into our consciousness.
When we think of a picture of blissful summer on the Cornish coast or of fairs and circuses, boxers and ballet dancers, gypsies, horses, theatres, dressing rooms, courtrooms and, most
