Category: Laura Knight - Oil Paintings and Watercolours
Location: Private
Image Available From: As above
Pixels: 1304 x 1029
DPI: 200dpi
Size: 935 KB
Tags: Animals, Babies and children
Watercolour, paste 18 x 22 inches Signed and dated bottom right hand corner.
This depicts Frankie Pollard, and his daughter perched on a sack of potatoes astride a farm horse called “Bess“, painted in St Buryan, Cornwall.
The artist painted an oil on canvas called March Many Weathers 1914 exhibited at the Royal Academy No.701 very similar to this watercolour. The artist admitted it was the first horse she had ever painted and states in her Autobiography that at the time ” I had not the courage to make it large enough to contain the whole horse” and Frankie said “ How didn’t Mrs Knight put the legs to Bess?”. Laura writes how she painted this picture in both her her autobiographies. Fifteen years after painting this picture the artist went on to study the horse at Carmo’s circus and soon became renown for painting horses to the extent that the race horse owner Lord Astor commissioned the artis to paint his Champion horse winners Pay Up and also Manamead.
Unlike the oil on canvas, this watercolour gives the full view of the horse including its legs, which the artist is recorded to have vowed to do sometime after painting the oil on canvas . The dog depicted is probably Frankie Pollard’s dog.
© Reproduced with permission of The Estate Dame Laura Knight DBE RA 2020 All Rights Reserved