ARTHUR HENRY KNIGHTON-HAMMOND ‘THE FORGOTTEN IMPRESSIONIST’
Brighton Beach – from the Chalet at Denys Town, Watercolour, 53 x 78cms, courtesy of Messums, St JamesThat man is the greatest painter in watercolours of our time’.
So wrote the artist Augustus John, of Arthur Henry Knighton-Hammond, in a review of an exhibition of his work in Menton, on the French Riviera, in 1926.
High praise indeed, from a notoriously harsh critic. Knighton-Hammond has been all but forgotten by the public in recent years, but in his pre-WW2 heyday the Nottingham-born painter was highly acclaimed on both sides of the Channel, for his vivacious depictions of everyday life, executed with a masterful blend of precision and spontaneity.
This shopkeeper’s son was feted by royalty, having met Prince Nicholas of Greece at an exhibition of his work in San Remo in 1923, and Queen Mary at a solo show at Beaux Arts in London in 1924. After the latter show, the auguste critic Jessica Walker-Stephens was so wowed, she wrote, in The Studio Magazine, ‘sheer delighted excitement ousted all critical desires’.
You can see what all the fuss was about in a fine show at Messums on Bury Street in St James, the first major survey of Knighton-Hammond’s work since 1976, which covers seven decades of his prodigious career, following the artist’s episodic life journey from Nottingham to Dorset, via Italy, France, Tunisia, Sussex and Somerset.
Knighton-Hammond was taught at Manchester Art School by the French impressionist Pierre Adolph Valette (as was LS Lowry) and in most of the work on show, one senses the artist’s powerful emotional response to his subject matter. ‘He works, he says, as a pianist must’ continued Walker-Stephens in that Studioreview; ‘in a certain highly attuned and keyed condition. Only in this state can he do his best work’.
And there’s plenty of his best work on show at Messums, both in watercolour and, on occasion, in oil. Brighton Beach – From the Chalet at Denys Town, chosen for the cover of the exhibition catalogue, describes a louche family group enjoying an afternoon of seaside sunshine; Mrs Knighton-Hammond with Mary c1928, evokes the tender relationship between mother and infant; Reeves the Tramp with a Broken Finger captures the stern dignity of an elderly gentleman of the road. The latter, a large-scale oil, sold on the exhibition’s busy opening night, to be hung, we understand, in a company boardroom.
Arthur Henry Knighton-Hammond died in 1970, aged 94, leaving a legacy of thousands of fine paintings, examples of which regularly come up at auction. This excellent show does much to restore his reputation as a superb watercolourist. The ‘forgotten impressionist’, as he has been dubbed by his biographer and collector Peter Norris, has been rightfully remembered and his star, one senses, is firmly in the ascendancy.