You’ve never heard of Winifred Knights, but you can buy a hat in the Dulwich Picture Gallery gift shop to help you look like her. A star student at the Slade in her teens, Knights (1899-1947) was a kind of bizarre It Girl, making her own clothes and doing her hair to reflect her passion for the art of the early Italian renaissance, particularly Piero della Francesca. Critics called her ‘a genius’. Now, apparently, she’s a ‘forgotten fashion icon’.
She’s neither. All credit to DPG for its series of shows devoted to neglected British artists, but trying to make out Knights was something she wasn’t doesn’t do her any favours. For the Pre-Raphaelites to be hung up on the Italian renaissance seems mildly eccentric; for Knights, it seems perverse. In WWI London she witnessed Zeppelin raids and the catastrophic Silvertown munitions factory explosion in 1917, but you’d never know it from her paintings. There’s plenty of her exquisite draftsmanship here – intense studies of woodland, a beautiful sketch of her mother’s boots – but when she works on a larger scale her figures become rigid, perhaps with the fear of discovering they’re living in the age of poison gas and birth control.
I feel sorry for Knights – a strange reaction to have in a gallery. There’s a poignancy to her story: supposedly destined for greatness, with hindsight she seems farcically out of step with her age, shredded by the machine of the twentieth century.
