Laura Knight: a pioneer’s London transport posters
Introduction
Laura Knight (1877-1970) was one of the most popular British artists of her lifetime, with her success paving the way for greater recognition of women artists. Knight was one of many women artists to be commissioned to design posters by the London Underground and London Transport.
Knight was born in Derbyshire and, after a challenging upbringing, studied at Nottingham School of Art in 1892. In 1903, Knight began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. Her fame progressively grew, and in 1929 she was created a Dame and became the first woman Academician in 1936.
Knight was best known for her fine art, including ‘Self Portrait with Nude’ (1913) that depicted her painting a nude female model in her studio at a time when female art students were generally not permitted to do this. She applied her talents widely, also working in watercolours, printmaking, tableware and glassware. Knight was also an official war artist during the Second World War. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Royal Academy in 1965, the first for a woman artist at the Academy.
Here we look at a slightly lesser known aspect of Knight’s long and wide-ranging career, sharing all seven of the posters she designed for London’s transport network between 1921 and 1957.
Knight was first commissioned by the Underground Group in 1921 to design these two posters, for travel by bus and tram respectively. Both promote the leisure opportunities offered by London’s transport network using a figurative lithographic drawing style with relatively simple colour palette. ‘Summer’s joy’ includes a quote from a popular poem by Robert Browning.
As a fine artist, Knight became known for her studies of the ballet and the circus. In this London Underground poster, she focuses on performers in the latter, with text advertising that the Underground’s ‘travel facilities lead to all the holiday attractions’.
Knight was also well known for her landscape painting. These two posters both utilise landscapes, in muted designs, to promote the wide-ranging locations that the London Transport network could lead to.
While these two poster commissions were nearly twenty years apart, both focus on the beauty of trees and landscape. The 1957 design uses a painterly style very much in keeping with Knight’s approach to landscape painting.
