Laura Knight: portraits

Stunning exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of work by Dame Laura Knight.

The exhibition included some wonderful pictures but also gave a good overview of how she worked and her immersion approach of spending months with her sitters who often seemed to become good friends. It also showed the balance between her commissioned work and the work she did for herself and to peruse a subject.

I liked the arrangement of the exhibition into sections of her immersion work such as ballet and theatre, gypsies, circus and the war years. The section on her time in America when she painted black patients from the segregated wards of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore was fascinating My favourite though had to be the pictures from World War II when she was a war artist. She developed a smooth style which could be reproduced well as she knew it was important for the images to be circulated.

The exhibition also gave a good view of her as a person and was as much about her as her work.

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