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Dame Laura Knight, English, 1877-1970
Title: Youth and Age
Date: 1925
Medium: Aquatint and drypoint
Dimensions:
Sheet: 46.9 x 52.9 cm
Plate: 36.3 x 37.8 cm
Signed: lower right (in pencil): Laura Knight
Credit Line: Presented, Brian Lalor Print Collection, 2014
Object Number: NGI.2014.87
DescriptionLaura Knight was an English artist in the figurative, realist tradition who worked in oils, watercolours and print. One of the most popular and pioneering British artists of the twentieth century, she worked as a war artist in both World Wars and was commissioned to record the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War. Around 1920 Knight bought Sir George Clausen’s printing press. She produced 90 prints, including drypoints, aquatints and etchings between 1923 and 1925. In 1922 she went to America, where she served on the jury at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Pictures. Much of her output focuses on women, who she tended to portray in their public roles – as actors, dancers and factory workers. Generational conflict between women was a major issue in the 1920s and the matriarch figure was frequently targeted as an obstacle to modernism. Stylistically, this print is similar to Gerald Brockhurst’s etchings of Connemara people of the early 1920s. The title may refer to a play published in 1924 by the Irish playwright Lennox Robinson, 'Crabbed Youth and Age'. Knight had met the writer at the annual dinner of the Critics Circle in June 1925.