Laura Knight had a long and celebrated career as arguably her generation's most popular female painter. In 1936 she became the first woman elected to full membership of the Royal Academy and her retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1965 was the first for a woman. Her success paved the way for greater recognition of women in the male-dominated British art establishment but her success was hard won through determination and talent and by a personality that was disarmingly charming but ruthlessly perceptive. She was able to move freely back-stage at the theatre where half-naked girls did not mind a woman studying them in the way they might dislike a man doing so. The clowns, ring-masters, lion-tamers and acrobats welcomed her as much as the female circus performers did because they recognised that she was an outsider, like them and like them, she was an artist. Able to cross social boundaries with ease, she preferred the company of those who lived on its fringes, like the gypsies in their camps and at the races where she painted from the open door of a Rolls-Royce lent to her by a friend as a studio. She was even accepted fully into the male-dominated world of an army camp where she saw no other women as she painted the recruits training in the boxing ring. She painted in armament factories and she was one of the artists who recorded the Nuremberg War Trials. She was an official war artist during WWII and designed recruiting posters for the Women's Land Army. Those who sat for their portraits ranged from HRH Queen Elizabeth to the black patients in the racially segregated wards of Baltimore Children's Hospital. Nobody can say that her career was not varied or that she conformed to a stereotype of a woman artist. She did not simply break down boundaries, she refused to see her gender as restricting what she could and could not paint. Her husband Harold, a quiet and fragile man, was supportive and loving of the whirlwind of her ambition and energy. He was an artist too and of considerable talent but his work was overshadowed by that of his wife. He loved and respected Laura, as so many others did - almost everyone who met her, including the coterie of artists who settled on the Cornish coast at Newlyn in the early twentieth century. It was the windswept pictures of women beside the sea, painted high on the Cornish cliffs, that tell us so much about this joyous time for her when her artistic ambitions were as endless as the sky above her.

The Flower is among the largest and most beautiful of Laura Knight’s canvases, depicting a quartet of girls on a cliff above the sea. Almost certainly painted in the summer of 1911 and exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year as her sole exhibit, it captures the artist’s renewed vigour for painting stimulated by her move from Yorkshire to Cornwall a few years earlier. The clear, bright summer light of the southern coast gave her pictures a startling freshness unequalled by her British contemporaries but comparable with the French Impressionists. From this same period is the watercolour Wind and Sun sold by Sotheby’s in 2009 for £914,850, the highest price ever achieved at auction for the artist.

The striped scarf and black hat worn by the woman on the left in The Flower is identical to that worn by one of the girls in Wind and Sun exhibited at the Royal Watercolour Society in 1911. The setting is probably also the same, the cliff-top meadow above Lamorna Cove. Two of the three women in The Flower were probably based upon artist’s models who Laura Knight had summoned from London after she found the local women in Cornwall unwilling to pose naked for the figure studies needed for her paintings. The young woman on the left was a particularly beautiful blonde girl named Dolly Snell who had been a Tiller-Girl and was able to kick the back of her own head – she married Laura Knight’s brother Edgar. These tall, beautiful and open-minded young women caused a stir in the quiet community of Newlyn and their exotic glamour is ably captured in Knight’s painting in which the girl in white looks boldly out at the spectator, inviting interaction and involving Knight as the fifth woman in the group on top of the cliff.

The model for the girl in white was Beatrice Stuart, a popular artist’s model in London who had posed for many painters including Dod Proctor, Frank Dicksee, John Singer Sargent, Alfred Munnings and Augustus John. She was also the model for the figure of Peace driving a quadriga in the bronze group by Adrian Jones’ on Decimus Burton’s Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner. Knight described her with much affection, as ‘a beautiful young creature…by her grace and poise, as well as by her activity and apparent ease in climbing rocks on the Cornish shore, few people knew her terrible loss.’ When she was seventeen she suffered from a bone disease which led to the loss of a leg.

The model for the woman on the right dressed in a blue smock was Florence Carter-Wood, the wife of Laura Knight’s great friend, the famous painter of horses Alfred Munnings. Laura Knight’s husband Harold painted a contemporary portrait of Florence shown in profile which proves her identity in The Flower. Florence is central to the love triangle portrayed in the film that has recently been made Summer in February, based upon a best-selling book. Florence is played by Emily Browning in the film billed as ‘a true tale of love, liberty and scandal amongst the Edwardian artists’ colony in Cornwall’.

The youngest girl in the painting, holding the eponymous flower is recognisable as Elizabeth ‘Mornie’ Birch, the eldest daughter of Knight’s friend, the painter Samuel John Lamorna Birch and his wife ‘Mouse’. Born in 1904 at Flagstaff Cottage in Lamorna, she lived her entire life in Cornwall and died in the same house that she was born, in 1990. She appears with her sister and father in a wonderful painting by Knight begun in 1913 and completed in 1933 (Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham) on the banks of the stream that her father often painted.

In 1912 Knight painted Mornie, Florence, Beatrice and Dolly again in another large canvas The Picnic (sold in these rooms, 9 July 2019, lot 96). This was a time when Knight was at the height of her confidence as an artist, painting on a large scale, subjects predominantly of women. She herself wrote forty years later of her time in Cornwall,

In the second decade of the twentieth century Knight worked upon a small number of large paintings, with bold aims to capture modern subjects on a scale usually associated with historical subjects - usually by male artists. The critically acclaimed Daughters of the Sun exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1911 was subsequently shown in various provincial exhibitions, the extensive transportation leading to its eventual destruction. Her other large pictures from this period were bought by municipal art collections and therefore there are few surviving privately-owned examples that compare with The Flower. The fact that the picture remained in Knight’s possession until it was sold at Sotheby’s in her studio sale in 1971 (where it was given the title The Gift), suggests that Knight was reluctant to part with The Flower which is one of the few paintings on this monumental scale from this period in her career. It may be that the painting encapsulated a happy period in her life so perfectly that she could not bear to part with it.

This picture will be included in the Catalogue Raisonné on the artist's works, currently being compiled by Mr R. John Croft FCA, the artist's great nephew to whom we are grateful for his input in this catalogue entry along with Kenneth McConkey.