Dame Laura Knight, R.A., R.W.S. 1877-1970

‘Laura was undoubtedly happiest when painting informal scenes backstage or dancers in their dressing rooms… Her dressing-room paintings express this joy in her surroundings…’ (Caroline Fox, Dame Laura Knight, 1988, p. 52)

Laura Knight was a great lover of ballet and the theatre and her fascination with the backstage rituals of the performers is clear in a series of charming and often humorous scenes of dancers in their dressing-rooms. The present painting depicts the inner sanctum of the ballerinas world, the cluttered dressing-room where a group of young ballerinas are applying their lipstick, filing their finger-nails and assessing their make-up in the mirrors. Knight described the scene of a ballerina's dressing-room thus; 'The dressing-table, crowded with pots of creams, powder puffs, trays of make-up, a comb, and pink ballet shoes with ribbons hanging down - all mirrored in the looking-glass behind - is ready made for a still life study. The wall around is covered with congratulatory telegrams, photographs of friends and ballet positions, to say nothing of a jar of handsome flowers picked from a former bouquet on the table itself, also duplicated in the mirror.' (Laura Knight, The Magic of Line, The Autobiography of Laura Knight D.BE., R.A., 1965, p. 157)

Knight was less interested in the spectacles that took place on the stage or the dancing itself, being more inspired by the ballerinas' preparations before and after their performances. In her autobiography Knight stated that her interest in painting scenes back-stage at the theatre had begun around 1914 when she and her husband Harold had regularly travelled to London to see the ballerina Adelian Genée perform at the Empire Music Hall in Leicester Square. When she made it known that she was interested to see back-stage life she was invited to see the dressing-rooms and wings of the theatre, the store-rooms and the lighting areas. She enjoyed the experience immeasurably but unfortunately was dissuaded from a repeat visit by the attentions of the young man who showed her around who insisted on putting his arm around her waist; fearing that he might be very important she felt she could not object. A short time later she was able to return to the theatre to begin sketching; 'It seemed a miracle, being able to get into any place I wanted to go, without any effort on my part - even into the Covent Garden stalls. My guardian angel was a Mr. Steer, my picture-framer and miracle-worker; he was able to get me the freedom of any theatre.' (ibid Knight, p. 153)  

Knight's earliest pictures of ballet scenes were exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in 1912 but the majority date from the years immediately after the First World War and beyond. As early as 1919 when the great impresario Diaghilev gave permission for Knight to sketch the ballerinas backstage at the Coliseum, she was embraced as part of the world of the dancers and was given an intimacy that a male artist would not have been permitted. She became particularly close to a young Russian dancer named Lydia Lopokova and was even invited to the home of the famous Pavlova to make drawings of the graceful dancer for publication. The ballerinas regarded Knight as a fellow professional and allowed her to work uninterrupted as she observed them working. The resulting pictures are natural and uncontrived and capture the individual character of the girls in a way that Degas' pastels and oil paintings did not. The Influence of Degas is clear in these paintings, especially in the standing figure of the girl binding her hair in the present work, but the anonymity which he purposefully achieved in his pictures of ballerinas is absent from Knight's paintings. Knight was certainly an admirer of Degas and when she visited the home of Mrs Havemeyer in New York in the early 1920s she was greatly inspired by her collection of Degas studies. In 1965 whilst discussing the scenes she witnessed backstage at the circus and the theatre, Knight wrote 'My thoughts often went to Degas and what he would have made of the material.' (ibid Knight, p. 154)

A second version of Ballerinas was painted in 1959, entitled Dressing Room.