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Laura Knight 1877-1970 Lamorna Cove c.1917 Pencil, watercolour and gouache 14 ½ x 17 inches (36.8 x 43.1 cm) Signed b.r. PROVENANCE Williams & Son, London; Private Collection. |
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This luminous watercolour captures the rugged charm of Lamorna Cove in Cornwall, a place that inspired Knight during her years in the Lamorna artist colony. Painted from the cliff-top above Flagstaff Cottage, the composition presents the tide-filled bay shimmering under sunlight, with rocks and shoreline reflecting warm earthy tones. Knight’s handling of watercolour conveys all the vibrancy and subtlety of Cornish light, transforming the scene into a study of colour, reflection, and atmosphere, the sea stretching eastwards toward the headland of Carn Du. Her own description of the bay - “the little bay … had been ‘turned to gold by the reflection of the sun shining on the cliff above’” - underscores her fascination with reflected light.
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Knight ignored the harbour structures and quarry workings in the bay and instead focuses entirely on the play of light and water: the pool becomes the stage for myriad colour harmonies of yellow, emerald, ultramarine, mauve and deep purple. She brings to the subject a heightened colour-sense, an Impressionist vibrancy and personal poetry. At bottom left of this scene, Knight places a trio of women - one holding a Japanese parasol - that provide human scale to the sweeping natural drama. They form a deliberate counterpoint to the brilliance of the sea and cliff-light, drawing the eye gently back from the expanse of shimmering water and reminding us of the human encounter with landscape.
Executed in 1916-17, this work falls at a significant juncture in Knight’s career. By this period she had left the darker tones of her earlier Staithes Group work and embraced the Mediterranean-like brilliance of the Cornish coast. It was then that her watercolours and oils of Lamorna became among her most celebrated - vivid, daring, and suffused with the joy of natural light. The shimmering interplay of water and reflections in this sheet has a conceptual resonance with Monet’s large Water Lily paintings of the same period, both artists exploring the transformative effects of sunlight on a liquid surface. While Knight almost certainly did not see Monet’s works in person, the parallel underscores a shared interest among early twentieth-century painters in water, light, and atmospheric colour. Subtle pencil outlines ground the composition, while washes of watercolour carry shifting tones. The work invites the viewer to experience the ebb and flow of the tide, the warmth of sunlight, and the quiet drama of Cornwall’s landscape - a vivid and poetic glimpse through Knight’s unique lens. CONDITION This work is in excellent condition. |