Daniel Ridgway Knight

Caught in a moment of reverie, the subject of Ridgway Knight’s painting captures the essence of a French peasant.  Her gaze towards the still water of the river suggests the calm in her mind as she breaks from her work.  The pasture of wildflowers, leading straight to the edge of the riverbank, lies before an idyllic view onto the hilly countryside beyond.  Scenes such as Moment of Repose came to characterize the style of “noble peasant portraiture” that Ridgway Knight, along with a number of his French contemporaries, made famous in the second half of the nineteenth century.  Although American, Ridgway Knight soon became one of the forerunners of this popular genre, which projected onto an idealized French peasant a symbolic purity of heart, and pride in the land.  

Artistically trained in his birthplace, Philadelphia, and then later in France, Ridgway Knight gained a traditional education in Academic painting.  Given to sketching above all, the young artist drew portraits of fellow passengers for a nominal fee while traveling by train in and around Philadelphia.  After returning to Paris for the second time in 1871, Ridgway Knight studied in the ateliers of both Alexandre Cabanel and Charles Gleyre, and continued to develop the classical models of history painting.  His early paintings yielded subjects ranging from mythology to operatic scenes, but the formal structure of history painting did not satisfy the artist.  From 1874 onward, Ridgway Knight devoted himself exclusively to the increasingly popular genre of peasant painting. 

Yet, Ridgway Knight never totally escaped his classical background.  The peasant women he depicted were models from real life, but he painted them with ideal proportions and refined elegance, a legacy from his classical training.  On a visit with other American artists, Ridgway Knight traveled to Barbizon to study with Jean-François Millet.  On this trip, the artist gained a deep appreciation for the effects of the plein air technique.  Upon his return home to Poissy, he set out to incorporate the principle of natural light painting and furnished an all-glass studio near his home.  From this point, Ridgway Knight would always paint his models in this studio, helping to explain the vivid quality and freshness of all his compositions.

As had been his habit in Philadelphia, Ridgway Knight would paint strangers whom he had met in his travels in the French countryside.  The model for this work, for example, would have likely lived in one of the nearby towns around Poissy, the rural French town where Ridgeway Knight moved after Paris.  As George Sheldon described in 1888, “Throughout Normandy, he is a familiar figure in the field and in the cottage.  A hundred times he has been called upon to act as godfather to the children of his models and, whenever one of them is married, she is sure to receive from Mr. Knight a handsome present in gold.  His habit in this regard is well known among them, and he is able to choose his models—how charming they are!—from a class which usually are not willing to serve in such a capacity,” (George Sheldon, Recent Ideals of American Art, New York and London, 1889, p. 18.)  The artist employed local women as his models, and often scoured the towns for well-worn clothing in which to dress them.  Thus, Ridgeway Knight created an authentic allure to his local models, placing them in a bucolic setting with classical style to create the effect of a noble peasant, reflecting the beauty of nature’s bounty around her.