Winifred Knights:
Compositional study for The Flight into Egypt, circa 1938
Framed (ref: 10341)

Pencil, pen and ink on tracing paper

19 x 35 in. (48.3 x 89 cm)

Tags: Winifred Knights Pen pen and ink landscape study 1.Master Drawings Knights at Dulwich

Provenance: The Artist's Son; Private collection

Exhibited: Winifred Knights, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 8 June - 18 September 2016. Cat nr 171.

Literature: Winifred Knights 1899-1947, Sacha Llewellyn, Published in 2016 by Lund Humphries on the occasion of the Exhibition Winifred Knights at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 8 June - 18 September 2016. Overleaf page 176-177, details page 175.

In 1937, Knights was commissioned by the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres to produce a large Decorative Painting ( 6 x 10 ft) of the Flight into Egypt for Balcarres Castle. The narrative was set on the banks of a stream covered in bluebells . By the time the Second World War was declared, Knights had partially completed the painting, with studies of the riverbank and foliage rendered with elaborate and minute detail. As a result of Knights’ sudden death in 1947, the painting was never realised.

 When the artist Sir D. Y. Cameron saw these drawings, he admired their intensity of observation: ‘The artist of today might laugh at my love and admiration of her work, so far removed from the spirit of our times’, he wrote. ‘But it is timeless and of another world’