Dulwich Picture Gallery will present the first major retrospective of work by Winifred Knights (1899-1947), an award-winning Slade School artist and the first British woman to win the Prix de Rome. The exhibition will establish Knights as one of the most original women artists of the first half of the 20th century, bringing together her most ambitious works and preparatory studies for the first time since they were created, including the apocalyptic The Deluge, 1920, which attracted critical acclaim as ‘the work of a genius’.

Knights’ admiration for the Italian Quattrocento was the inspiration for a highly distinctive and painstakingly executed body of work. The smooth surface, contemplative mood and harmoniously restricted palette of her paintings consciously recall early Renaissance frescoes, adapted to everyday subjects from her own time. Knights’ works are deeply autobiographical: presenting herself as the central protagonist and selecting models from her inner circle, she consistently re-wrote and re-interpreted female figures of fairy-tale and legend, Biblical narrative and Pagan mythology to create documents of her own lived experience.

Arranged chronologically Winifred Knights (8 June – 18 September) will highlight the key periods in the artist’s career, beginning with the work she produced at the Slade School before charting her stylistic developments at the British School at Rome. The exhibition will also explore significant themes that run throughout Knights’ oeuvre including women’s independence, modernity and her experiences of wartime England. Over 70 preparatory studies will provide a true insight into Knights’ working process, displayed alongside her large-scale paintings to reveal an artist of supreme skill with meticulous attention to detail.

Sacha Llewellyn, curator of the exhibition, comments: 'Although never part of the modernist avant-garde, Knights engaged with modern-life subjects, breathing new life into figurative and narrative painting to produce an art that was inventive and technically outstanding. She explored form and colour to create a mood of calmness and reflection that impacts directly on our senses. Like so many women artists, heralded and appreciated in their own day, she has disappeared into near oblivion. This exhibition, in bringing together a lifetime of work, will create an irrefutable visual argument that she was one of the most talented and striking artists of her generation.'

Loans have been secured from a number of lenders including major lender, UCL Art Museum, University College London, The British Museum, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, Tate, London and numerous private collectors who are generously lending from their collections. A vast majority of these works have never been exhibited before and will be reproduced in the accompanying catalogue for the first time.

‘Winifred Knights (1899-1947)’ is part of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Modern British series, a programme of exhibitions devoted to critically neglected Modern British artists.

Exhibition dates: 8 June - 18 September 2016.

Tickets: (Pre-book online):
£12.50* Adult
£11.50* Senior Citizens
£7.50* Unemployed, disabled, students
FREE children, Friends
*Ticket prices include a voluntary Gift-Aid donation

For more details and to book visit the website.

Below is The Deluge, 1920 by Winifred Knights.