Winifred Knights - The Potato Harvest - 1918
In 1917, traumatised by the zeppelins looming over Streatham, Knights found refuge on her cousins’ farm in Worcestershire (it says something about her father’s over-investment in her career that he fretted that she might be harming her artistic chances). The Potato Harvest (1918) shows a frieze of male and female workers in social and economic harmony on the land. The distant fields have been flattened into a patchwork quilt of contrasting colours, out of which rise strong verticals of haycocks and ladders. The workers – modelled by Knights and her cousins – are all wearing robust rural dress of the kind advocated by Aunt Millicent’s friend, Edward Carpenter, as a way of resisting the endless consumerist churn of factory-produced fashion. Knights adopted this part-peasant, part-bohemian rig for the rest of her life, self-aware enough to know that it suited her lithe body and Modigliani facial features to perfection. Kathryn Hughes
Size: 3100px × 2404px
Photo credit: © steeve-x-art / Alamy / Afripics
License: Royalty Free
Model Released: No
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