DAME LAURA KNIGHT (1877-1970) Biography
NEWLYN SCHOOL (c.1884-c.1920)

Description / Expertise

Ethel is a portrait of Ethel Robertson (née Bartlett), who had been introduced to Harold and Laura Knight through Mrs Clara Lucas of the Russian Ballet. She had become a friend to both of them and had, by 1929, been having a lengthy affair with Harold. In that same year Laura had spent the season with the Mills-Carmo circus at Margate in Kent where she produced her impressive body of work on the theme of the circus. On her return to London in the autumn she produced a small edition of etchings (probably ten) from this drawing.

Laura understood only too well the attraction of Ethel and she wrote later:

‘I believe that almost all the work I did for a time - even when the subject was an entirely different one - had something of Ethel in it. A man told me once that Ethel looked too much like the sort of girl you couldn’t help falling in love with. I can imagine that to be true.’(1)


1. Janet Dunbar, Laura Knight, Collins, London, 1975, page 122