‘A volley of fish heads’ British Impressionists at David Messum
One can safely assume that Laura Knight’s Baiting Lines, Staithes (c1900) was not painted on a Sunday.
Dame Laura Knight DBE RA RWS. Baiting Lines, Staithes, oil on canvas 46.5 x 55.8 cms
Courtesy of David Messum
The canvas is currently on show at David Messum, in the London gallery’s summer exhibition, a collection of works by painters who might loosely be dubbed ‘British Impressionists’ (until July 28).
The signature on the painting, ‘Laura Johnson’ bears Knight’s maiden name, which dates it before 1903, when she married her sweetheart Harold Knight, with whom she had permanently moved to the North-East Yorkshire fishing village in 1897, after several protracted visits. The couple had met at Nottingham School of Art in 1890.
The insular fishing community at Staithes was notoriously wary of strangers, but it seems that the young couple managed to integrate themselves, and gain the trust of the locals, who they both painted, grafting away at their trade. The god-fearing community was extremely hard-working, and amassed such a large catch – largely of mackerel, haddock and cod – that the North-East Railway company ran three fish trains a week from the station above the harbour, down to London.
The young painter was still developing her style: the fisherfolk are painted in a naturalistic manner, the beach and sea are represented with much looser strokes, clearly influenced by contemporary French pointillism: Knight was an avid student of colour theory. She went on, of course, to become one of Britain’s most celebrated artists, only the second woman to be made a full member of the RA. But back in her Staithes days she was too poor to afford models, so she turned her artistic attention onto local children and fishermen. Few such early works survive.
The Knights abandoned Staithes in 1906, eventually moving to Lamorna, near Newlyn, home to the artists’ colony which became known as the ‘Newlyn School’, so important in the history of British painting as it moved from stuffy Victorian classicism towards Modernism. Most of the work in this show is by artists connected with that group, including Stanhope Alexander Forbes, Frank Bramley, Walter Langley, Thomas Cooper Gotch and Samuel John Lamorna Birch. In the gallery window, demurely looking out onto Bury Street, is a fine portrait of the artist-model Eileen Mayo, by Harold Knight. Mayo (who was given a show of her own at Towner Eastbourne last year) was a frequent visitor to the Knights’ Cornish home.
As for my earlier comment about Sunday in turn-of-the-century Staithes: the fishing community – like that in Newlyn – was deeply religious, and any form of work was prohibited on the day of rest. Even the members of the painting colony that collected around the Knights were discouraged from working at their easels. Ernest Rigg chose, one day, to ignore their disapproval: he was ‘eventually stopped [from painting] by a volley of fish heads.’ As a born-and-bred Yorkshireman, perhaps he should have known better.