Winifred Knights - Leaving the Munitions Works - 1919
It was after the war, in 1919, that Knights truly came into her own at the Slade. In that year, having already established a reputation for quality and meticulousness in her work, she produced a relatively small, nearly square watercolour, Leaving the Munitions Works (). This is a constructed cultural memory of a relatively typical scene of female labour in wartime: as Sacha Llewellyn has pointed out, by 1917 approximately eighty per cent of the weapons used by the British Army were produced by Knights’s image positions the viewer gazing down onto a road between two low brick walls bordered by gas lamps. The cropped figures of a well-dressed working class couple front the scene beyond, which shows women munitions workers – each with a highly individual personality of her own and each in a standard-issue uniform – linking arms and conversing with one another. However still and serene the tone of the image may be in its execution and, on the surface at least, its mood, it is also an imagining of the kind of place at which the explosion took place that killed and injured so many at Silvertown in 1917. There is also the suggestion that leave-taking here is not only for this particular day, but one conducted en masse when women returned to the home and to their former means of earning a living, if any, after the war. In Leaving the Munitions Works the rhythm of houses and their gently gabled roofs, and the rolling hill in the distance that fills up the horizon almost entirely and enfolds the viewer within the immediate space of the skyless town, anticipate some of the compositional techniques that Knights would use months later when finalising her Rome Prize-winning painting The Deluge. The Tate
Size: 3200px × 2704px
Photo credit: © steeve-x-art / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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