Dame Laura Knight, R.A., R.W.S.

Christie's, 12 November 1965, lot 117;
Richard Green, London;
Private collection

Caroline Fox, Dame Laura Knight, 1988, p.34, illus. col. pl. 19

STRUCTURE The canvas is unlined. The paint surface is in fine condition with good impasto; clean and ready to hang. ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT UV light reveals a few, tiny spots of retouching to frame abrasions and one tiny spot to the sea, upper left. Otherwise good original condition. FRAME Held in a fine plaster gilt frame in good condition. For more information regarding this picture please contact the Victorian & Edwardian Pictures Department on +44 (0)207 293 5718
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'Female figures, dressed and sitting on the edge of a cliff outlined against the sea, continued to be a popular subject with Laura for many years. These paintings are extremely bright and colourful and reveal her delight in painting the sea in its different moods with shimmering reflections and ripples around the rocks.' (Caroline Fox, Dame Laura Knight, 1988, p.34)

In the years after her move to Cornwall in 1907 there was nowhere more beautiful and inspiring to Laura Knight than the cliffs above the ocean at Lamorna and at Carn Barges along the coast. On the Cliffs depicts two girls seated at the cliff-edge enjoying the last of the late afternoon sun. One of the girls appears to be sewing whilst the other may be threading a needle. The sun is low in the sky and illuminates the sea with brilliant silvery light, casting deep shadows from the cliffs and creating a stark silhouette of the rocks against the sky.

On the rugged cliff top between the coves at Lamorna and Portcurno, Knight painted several of her most arresting pictures of sunlight refracted from the ocean. The owner of the land, Colonel Paynter built a small wooden hut for her on the cliffs in which to store her canvases and materials and to offer shelter when the weather was inclement. Around the hut were patches of higher ground used to cultivate daffodils with their riot of spring colour. As she described in her autobiography written in 1936; 'Close by my hut, Carn Bargis (sic) towered. No human hand could have fashioned so architecturally magnificent a pile of granite. On the flat rocks below it were deep pools for swimming and pools in which to paddle. Pinkish fern-like coral, delicate growth of weed, tiny crabs and fish showed clearly in the shallows, as a picture seen through green-tinted glass.' (Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint, 1936, p. 191) Every day she would take the footpath that climbed steeply up from Lamorna Cove and followed the edge of the cliffs to resume her painting or sketching. Sometimes she might have the welcome interruption from her work of a fisherman named John Jeffreys who went there to fish for mullet. Once he pointed out the dark shapes of whales moving just beneath the surface of the waves below where they were standing. In the summer friends like Lamorna Birch and his wife would bring their children to swim in the pools below or comb for shells on the beach while Laura made copious drawings of them in the little sketch-books that she kept in the pockets of her cardigan. Laura portrayed herself painting a canvas wedged between rocks whilst a model poses in the foreground and children busy themselves searching for crabs in the rock-pools, in  A Summer's Day by the Rock Pool (private collection). She also made sketches of the young women that came there to bathe; 'poised ready to dive, or curving through the air from some great flat rock to plunge into the depths below bordered by a weed fringe, like coarse hair of greenish-brown colour, which curled and uncurled as the water surged and up or receded.' (Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint, 1936,p. 191). Always accompanied by her adored and wayward dog Tip, she often saw no-one all day in the cooler months and was entirely absorbed in the natural wonder of the landscape.

The pictures that she painted on the Cornish cliffs were arguably bolder statements and more remarkable than the circus, gypsy and ballet pictures painted later in her career, as they were less reliant on the charm of the subject. Who the women are and what they are doing is of lesser importance as they are merely part of a scene in which nature is the more beautiful and dominant element. These pictures were painted with broad strokes of bright colour worked wet into wet to create expressive impasto. The compositions often took a high vantage looking down towards the sea, the descent interrupted by rocks and figures in the foreground. In one of the paintings At the Edge of the Cliff the girl towers above the boulders below and in another Lamorna Cove the rocks upon which the woman is reclining slope steeply down to the water where the ocean opens out in a panorama before us.

In her autobiography Knight referred to pictures of girls on cliffs but was unspecific about which pictures she was referencing. The series was certainly begun in 1912 following Knight's exhibition at the Royal Academy of Daughters of the Sun (destroyed), a large and ambitious picture of nude girls bathing from the rocks.  She continued to be inspired by the theme until 1918 when she and her husband moved to London. Caroline Fox has dated On the Cliffs c.1917 and the boldness of the colouring and dynamic composition is consistent with her mature work in Cornwall. It is interesting to compare On the Cliffs with the large watercolour Wind and Sun painted around 1913 (sold in these rooms, 15 July 2009, lot 69). In the earlier picture the interaction of the two girls suggests a narrative that is consciously absent from On the Cliffs. The open composition and bright lighting of Wind and Sun has been replaced by a more saturated and robust colouring.

To paint the figures in On the Cliffs is likely that Knight used the numerous studies of three professional models from London, who had been summoned to Cornwall when she painted Daughters of the Sun in 1911. One of these models, an ex-Tiller-Girl named Dolly Snell (later Mrs Edgar Knight; she married Harold's brother) was particularly favoured by Laura who envied her ability to be able to kick the back of her own head. Laura made the most of the three models and filled sketchbooks of them in different poses that she used for numerous pictures over many years.

The days painting in the summer sun were idyllic but it is noticeable that there are no men in these cliff-top pictures as most were across the ocean facing the horrors of war. In her paintings of the Cornish coast Laura Knight defiantly celebrated the glorious British shoreline which although threatened by invasion by enemy forces remained impenetrable. The majestic rocks that these two women have scrambled across to watch the setting sun have a silent, eternal monumentality whilst the silver light mirrored by the ocean suggests the hope of the future.