Dame Laura Knight: I Paint Today

The new exhibition Dame Laura Knight: I Paint Today opens at Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum this Saturday 13 January and runs until Sunday 30 June 2024.

Curated by Worcester City Art Gallery & Museum, I Paint Today pays homage to this significant artist who was the first female artist welcomed into the Royal Academy and whose love of Worcestershire and the Malvern Hills inspired her art throughout the later years of her life.

I Paint Today brings a stirring selection of Knight’s work to Worcestershire and focuses on key events, characters and achievements which helped to shape her life and career. Works from the Worcester City collection will be joined by loans from regional and national collections including the Imperial War Museum, to help tell the story of a woman who grew out of the Victorian era and developed and adapted her craft through a period of tumultuous change.

From 1933 Laura Knight and her husband, Harold were frequent visitors to Malvern and fell in love with the dramatic landscape of the Malvern Hills which became a subject of her much-loved paintings. Knight claimed she did her best landscapes in Malvern and her paintings of this period demonstrate her love of the countryside in all seasons. She would start her day with a walk over the Malvern Hills, using make-shift studios around the hills to create from, and then meet fellow artists to ‘take the water’.

Museum Opening Hours – Tuesday to Saturday 10am – 4pm, Sunday 10am – 3pm

Image Credit:  Sundown, c.1955 (oil on canvas), Knight, Laura (1877-1970) / Wolverhampton Art Gallery, West Midlands, UK / © Wolverhampton Art Gallery / © Estate of Dame Laura Knight. All rights reserved 2023 / Bridgeman Images