Dame Laura Knight
British, 1877-1970
Emigrants, 1923
Oil on canvas
25 x 30 inches (63.5 x 76.2 cm)
Framed: 32 x 37 inches (81.2 x 94 cm)
Signed: Laura Knight
Inscribed on the reverse: July 1923 - no. 37 N.E.
Provenance:
Dr. Kodak Gregory, by 1936
Sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 1960s
Private Collection, New York, acquired at the above sale, to the present
Literature:
Charles Marriott, Laura Knight: A Book of Drawings, London, 1923, pl. VI, for illustration of the watercolor study and mention of the present work
Dame Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint, London, 1936, p. 248, "...All through the voyage both [Lucien Simon] and I drew. My sketches proved useful for several pictures. One, of the emigrants on the lower deck, Dr. Kodak Gregory has now."
Dame Laura Knight, Emigrants No. 2 [1922]
Exhibited: Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours, 1923, no. 89
Painted circa 1922-23, this work was based on sketches and a finished watercolor of the same subject made during the artist's first voyage to America on the Olympic in 1922. Laura Knight had been invited by Homer Saint-Gaudens, the Assistant Director of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, to be one of two European representatives on the Jury of Awards for that year's International Exhibition of Paintings. The other European member was the French painter, Lucien Simon, with whom Knight traveled on her Atlantic crossing. Both artists made many studies on the voyage, mainly of emigrants on the lower deck.
The watercolor study for the present work, which similarly depicts a view looking aft from the promenade deck into the steerage, was exhibited at the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolors in 1923. It was also illustrated in Laura Knight: A Book of Drawings, published in the same year with a foreword by Charles Marriott.
The present painting is an oil on canvas depicting a scene of European emigrants enjoying the open air of the steerage deck, on their way to America, on the Olympic liner in 1922. Laura Knight was aboard on the same crossing and produced a series of sketches and watercolors during the voyage. The painting was executed the following year 1923, from a watercolor composition executed aboard.
Knight was sailing to America at the invitation of Homer Saint-Gaudens, the Assistant Director of Fine Art at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, to be one of two European painter jurists at the 1922 International Exhibition of Paintings at the Carnegie Institute. Upon completion of the painting in 1923, the artist placed the work with a patron collector, in New York. It next came to light when it was presented for sale at a Parke-Bernet auction in the 1960s and has remained in the same New York family since. It is in excellent and original state. There is a date and partial inscription in the artists hand on the upper stretcher bar. There is also the beginnings of an unfinished landscape painting on the verso surface of the canvas.
In 1926, Knight accompanied her husband Harold Knight on a visit to Baltimore where he had been commissioned to paint portraits of the Johns Hopkins faculty. During their stay, Laura turned her attention to marginalized figures within American society, taking as her subject the patients and staff in the racially segregated wards of two hospitals which served Baltimore’s Black population.
