Knight was an English artist who worked in oils, water colours, etching, engraving and dry point. Knight was a painter in the figurative, realist tradition and who embraced English Impressionism. In her long career, Knight was among the most successful and popular painters in Britain. Her success in the male-dominated British art establishment paved the way for greater status and recognition for women artists.
Her self-portrait (1913) showing her fully clothed profile with a nude model was decried as a vulgar "artistic exercise" that should have remained in her studio. Men's right to represent the female body had never been questioned. Knight, however, had been banned from life classes while at Nottingham School of Art. By the time Knight painted it she was 36, and by her own admission, "able to sell everything I touched." In 1946 she was sent to Nuremberg to paint the war trials. In "The Nuremberg Trial" (1946) she makes a rare break with realism to dissolve the courtroom into a derelict cityscape that represents postwar Nuremberg. Chiefly, however, this is a masterly chronicle of what philosopher Hannah Arendt dubbed the banality of evil. Sandwiched between barristers and soldiers, the Nazis - including Goering, Hess and Speer - are respectable white-haired gents whose relaxed demeanor, as they whisper and take notes, suggests they have registered neither the enormity of their rimes nor the depths of their fall.
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