British Artist Winifred Knights Exquisite Religious Painting

THE TELEGRAPH

By Alastair Sooke

The Marriage at Cana, 1923 CREDIT: THE ESTATE OF WINIFRED KNIGHTS

UNITED KINGDOM---If the British artist Winifred Knights (1899-1947) is remembered at all today, it is for a single picture: "The Deluge" (1920), in the Tate. This striking scene, with its dynamic sideways rhythm, in which 21 figures clamber away from a waterfall towards a mountain, won a prestigious award, and made her name.Knights was declared a “genius” for fusing Italian Quattrocento painting with angular Vorticist modernity, transforming a Biblical subject into a lament for the First World War. Bravo, Dulwich Picture Gallery, for rescuing Knights from the deluge of obscurity. [link]

Compositional study for The Deluge, 1920 CREDIT: THE ESTATE OF WINIFRED KNIGHT

A kind of hectic cinema in the long shadows and violent geometry’: Winifred Knights’s The Deluge (detail) (1920), for which she won the Prix de Rome. Photograph: © The Estate of Winifred Knights/Tate