Oil Paint and Grease Paint: Autobiography of Laura Knight

London: Ivor, Nicholson, and Watson, 1936. First UK Edition. INSCRIBED in ink within a cartoon drawing of circus figures by author Laura Knight: "This Book Belongs to Maurice Codner / Laura Knight." An uncommon signature, most especially in the context of a drawing.

With illustrations of Knight's work throughout. Dame Laura Knight was a very successful English artist who embraced English Impressionism but often brought to it a modernist, sometimes surreal sensibility. Her success in the male-dominated British art establishment paved the way for greater status and recognition for female artists (Rosie Broadley, "Laura Knight Portraits," 2013).

Knight was proficient in oils, watercolors, etching, engraving, and drypoint. Her work was initially devoted to painting for the theatre and ballet world in London, but later diversified, including a long relationship with advertisement art for London Transport. She was named a Dame in 1929, and became the third woman elected to full membership of the Royal Academy in 1936, the same year this volume was published.

In 1926, Knight joined her husband as part of a residency at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital. There, she became interested in the early Civil Rights Movement, and began creating increasingly conceptual works. Much of her work from this time involved women in then-unusual capacities—examples being a Land Army Girl, a woman with cropped hair wearing a jacket and holding a shotgun, and a portrait of a woman saxophone player displayed at the The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

In 1965 the Royal Academy would put on a large retrospective exhibition of her work, their first for a woman.

Very Good in red cloth and a paper title label on the backstrip. Moderate lean, lightly scuffed, with rubbing at the extremities, though with binding still quite firm.

[Book #169227]