Dame Laura Knight, RA, RWS (British, 1877-1970)


Harvesting, Malvern signed and dated 'Laura Knight/1965' (lower right)oil on canvas76.5 x 96.5cm (30 1/8 x 38in).
|ProvenanceIan MacNicol, Glasgow.Private collection, UK.The present lot depicts Walter and Fred Bishop harvesting on Callow Farm. The family farm (owned by their father and grandfather before them) was near Colwall, and Knight has captured the scenery looking down from the Malvern hills. Colwall, a village in Herefordshire, is where the Knights would stay during the Second World War and in their summer vacations after the War, up until the death of Harold Knight in 1961. A similar scene of Walter and Fred is depicted in a watercolour, Walter and Fred Bishop loading Hay, sold Sotheby's, London, 4 July 2001, lot 123.In the present lot, Knight has positioned the branch of a tree at the forefront of the picture plane; this was a compositional technique that the artist used in a number of her other Malvern compositions, such as A Misty Sunrise, 1956, currently in the collection of the Royal Academy, London.In her autobiography, Knight recalls the landscape of Malvern, 'It took years and years for me to become sufficiently familiar with the immense beauty of that landscape before I even dared to make the least record of such visual indulgence. As I write I live again, basking in the first rays of the sun rising over the Bredon Hill to dry up the floating strands of mist hiding the flatter country to the west'.1We are grateful to Mr R. John Croft FCA for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.1 Laura Knight, The Magic of a Line, London, 1965, p. 309.