Laura Knight's Hat

 

Laura Knight Self with Ella Napper 1913 NPG

 Yesterday  an excellent webinar on diverse aspects of Laura Knight's art work was held at the MK Gallery Milton Keynes.  Including a great short film on Barrage Balloons and the women who managed, manoeuvred, mended and maintained them.  if one hadn't known of Knight's  painting of the team launching an airship-sized balloon, the fact that this wartime detachment was [all?] female might have been ignored and forgotten. 

Several MK speakers alluded to Knight's famous and famously popular Self-Portrait painting Ella Napper as a standing life model,  noting the double back views, so that both the egocentric artist's face and the erotic display of the female nude are obscured.  But also, that the artist claims for herself the traditional male role.

Once more, I was struck by her hat  -  surely a version of the bohemian artist's wideawake? rather like a beard a sort of emblem signifying 'Edwardian painter'.  And then the scarlet top, joined with the other assertive reds.  Where have we seen these before?  

In G. F. Watts' Self-Portraits [of which he did many]  Both the black hat and the red gown

    

GFW  was the doyen of the British art world when Knight was young. Even the epitome of the genius painter as constructed in the Victorian age.  Did the Knights visit the GFW retrospective at the RA in 1905?  I 'd guess it had a subliminal, if not direct influence.  

Knight's floppy flower-decked felt and droopy red cardi are of course outclassed by Watts' swagger hat and cardinal's robe.  But they do subtly mock the Great Artist image.

Her self-portrait expresses her ambition in  this period. As she recalled ''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.'