Tuesday 9th December - The Reader

Hopefully I have managed to get all the Christmas cards in the post now and I'm down to the things I'm giving to people in person. Don't imagine I'm actually organised as most of this is the result of panic. At least I can have a bit of a sit down for today's picture...

The Reader (1910) Harold Knight

I do love a bit of Laura husband's art.  I must apologise, but that is how I think of him and that is such a rarity, where the wife becomes more famous than her husband, even though she took her husband's name.  I digress, today is about Harold and he's more than just someone's husband, obviously. I had no hesitation in choosing this one as it is just lovely, but I have a question about a press comment at the time - the Globe described it as 'a delightful out-of-door portrait' which puzzles me. Are they just mixing it up with another painting that was painted outside or does that phrase have another meaning? The Western Daily Press gave it a glowing review - 'one of the most important canvases in the gallery' - yet they did not feel, for all the charm of the sitter, that it was one of his most significant works. They complain the landscape is monotonous and uninspiring.  What? Oh, hang on...

The Reader (1909)

Okay, I get it now, although having two paintings with the same title exhibited in the same year might confuse some less intelligent art historians (cough). But come on, that's rather lovely too, so what are we all complaining about? It's not like he could have done a better picture of a woman reading, could he?

Girl Reading (1932)

Oh, I see. That is glorious. I once bought a novel because that was the cover. It's a little out of my normal date range but I am a sucker for twentieth century figurative and this sort of minutely studied domestic interior is my sort of thing. When it was exhibited it was compared to this painting from the same period, using the same model and room setting (according to the Nottingham Evening Post)...

A Window in St John's Wood (c.1932)

There is something about temperature in Knight's pictures that gives them feeling.  Looking at our Reader in 1910, the colour palate feels warm and comfortable, with the books in abundance.  Scrolling on to 1932 and the woman is reading a thin book in front of a sparce landscape. She sits and sews on bare boards looking over leaf-less trees.  Now, this can easily be dismissed as style and fashion, but if we think about this being the same woman either side of the First World War, and how her life and outlook might have changed. In the warm golden days of the Edwardian era, she has time to read and books aplenty or she can walk outside in a lush green landscape under a blue sky. Twenty years later, between two world wars, she is mending in front of waning light and a grey garden. Yes, her clothes look lush, but her surroundings seem pale and cold. Is she part of the surplus 2 million women left after the war to find a new path that wasn't marriage and babies? That must have been frightening as well as freeing, managing a new future as well as potential poverty but still choosing their own future more than before.  Maybe that is the message of the later paintings - yes, on the outside the landscape seems cold and empty, but our lass has got her book, her brilliant skirt and her own life. Good for her.

See you tomorrow.