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Dame Laura Knight

Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970), a native of Long Eaton, Derbyshire

Laura Johnson was born in Long Eaton, Derbyshire, in 1877. She studied art in Nottingham in 1900 and while there married the portrait painter, Harold Knight (1874-1961] in 1903. With him she joined the artists' colony at Staithes in Yorkshire, moving in 1908 to Newlyn, Cornwall, where they stayed throughout the war.

Created a Dame of the British Empire in 1929, Laura produced a long series of oil paintings of the ballet, the circus and gipsy life. She painted many other subjects besides, and established herself as the most important woman artist in Britain. In 1936 she became the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy since 1760.

Her retrospective at the RA in 1965 was the first accorded to a woman.

During the Second World War Knight became an official war artist and was sent to cover the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. In later life she concentrated on watercolour landscapes. Laura Knight died in 1970.

• Artists With Derbyshire Connections
• Laura knight

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County:  Derbyshire

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