‘Carting Corn’ was acquired into the Worcester City collection in 2023 with generous support from the Dame Laura Knight Society.
Dame Laura Knight (1877-1970) is considered one of Britain’s most successful female artists. Throughout her long career she produced a hugely varied body of work.
Her first love was landscapes, painting the North Yorkshire coast at Staithes in the 1890s, and then the Cornish coast after moving to join the artists colony at Newlyn in 1907. She developed her figurative painting in the 1920s and 1930s capturing on canvas the performers behind the scenes at the theatre and ballet. During the Second World War, she became an official war artist and travelled to Nuremberg in 1946 to pictorially document the trials. She also worked on commissions from the London Transport Network and Cadbury’s, and was invited to collaborate with other artists such as Clarice Cliff on exciting ranges of tableware for Harrods.
One of her favourite subjects, however, was horses. From circus horses and racehorses to the cart horses still pulling ploughs in the 1940s, she revisited them time and time again. She said of the horses, “How I loved those beasts. I painted them constantly; each possessed a character all its own”.
This print, called ‘Carting Corn’, is a wonderful example of her admiration for the majestic animals. It is from an edition of 100 issued by the Print Collector’s Club in 1943, which was a very important time for Knight in Malvern.
After being invited to the Malvern Festival in 1931 by close friend Sir Barry Jackson, she developed an affection for the hills which continued for the rest of her life. She and her husband, artist Harold Knight, made it their permanent home for the duration of the Second World War.
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