Daniel Ridgway Knight

An English Family, 1911
Private Collection (by descent from the above and sold, Sotheby's, New York, April 18, 2008, lot 46, illustrated, as Maidens Waiting)
Acquired at the above sale 

George William Sheldon, Recent Ideals of American Art, New York, 1888-90, illustrated opposite p. 27

Lined. There is craquelure visible throughout the picture surface. Under UV: finely applied dashes and lines of inpainting are visible throughout the composition, with concentrated areas in and around the figures, stone wall, fence and foreground. A few dashed lines of inpainting are visible along the upper edge.
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After Daniel Ridgway Knight’s first artistic successes in Paris, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissioner invited him to move to Poissy, a rural town not far outside the city limits. The renowned Meissonier was impressed with Ridgway Knight's talent and offered his protégé advice and a challenge: to paint a large picture from a recent sketch.  Ridgway Knight boldly met his mentor's goal, and the resulting painting of 1875, Les Laveuses (sold in these rooms April 25, 2006, lot 142) set him in a new direction, informing a series of ambitious and complex multi-figural compositions, like the present work.

As a proponent of painting en plein air, Ridgway Knight closely studied natural light and his masterful technique can be seen in the present work, where he effectively depicts his scene under the flat overcast sky of late autumn. In A Halt, each detail of the landscape, field workers' costumes, gestures, and their heavy loads of vegetables and house wares are carefully described to suggest how the efforts of "simple" tasks affected the women of Poissy. Ridgway Knight was also influenced by the works of Jean-François Millet and, while painting in Barbizon in 1874, he visited the artist. However, Ridgway Knight was not seduced by Millet’s realist view of rural farm life, choosing instead to depict his peasants in more cheerful circumstances. Such an idealization of the rural laborer followed themes established earlier in the nineteenth century and popularized by Ridgway Knight's contemporaries, such as Jules Breton and even William Bouguereau.