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Abstract
This article discusses Winifred Knights’ Scenes from the Life of Saint Martin of Tours (1933, St Martin’s Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral). It examines the reredos’ narratives and functions. For the commissioners it was integral to a memorial to Alfred, Lord Milner; for Knights, the central narrative represented her stillborn son. Knights, who had won the Rome Prize for The Deluge in 1920, adapted her design in response to Sir Herbert Baker’s suggestions. Later in the 1930s, Dean Hewlett Johnson moved the painting to the Crypt. The article argues that it is best seen in the original memorial location associated with service and resurrection.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was conducted while studying for my doctorate at the University of East Anglia and I am most grateful for the guidance of David Peters Corbett, my doctoral supervisor. My conversations and interview with John Monnington, the artist’s son, were invaluable. Thanks, also, to the curators and collectors of public and private archives, and particularly to the anonymous readers of Visual Culture in Britain for their valuable feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 ‘The painting is thought to be oil, but it could be tempera. When [the Cathedral was] approached about this for the Dulwich exhibition [June to September 2016], it was decided that a sample would need to be taken to establish for certain.’ Email from Cressida Williams, Head of Archives and Library, Canterbury Cathedral, to the author, August 2, 2016.
2 See for instance: Nadia Hebson, ‘Invisible/Visible’, in Patricia de Montfort, Robyne Erica Calvert, ‘Still Invisible?’, British Art Studies, Issue 2, 2016; Sacha Llewellyn, Winifred Knights, 2016; Florence Hallett, ‘It’s about Time Winifred Knights Got some Attention’, Apollo, September 1, 2016; Tony Mackle, ‘Religious Visions’. In Ted Gott, Laurie Benson and Sophie Matthieson eds. Modern Britain 1900–1960: Masterworks from Australia and New Zealand Collections, 2007.
3 Saint Martin, who lived in the fourth century, was consecrated Bishop of Tours in c. 371. He is known as the patron saint of service and of the military. English churches that connect St Martin to service include St Martin’s in the Fields, Trafalgar Square, London, and the church of St Martin, Canterbury, founded in the sixth century. Many paintings show connections between the saint’s military role and service, with St Martin wearing armour and giving a portion of his cloak to a beggar. Examples include Van Dyck’s Saint Martin Dividing his Cloak (c.1618, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle); El Greco’s St Martin and the Beggar (1597–1599, National Gallery of Art, Washington); Jean Fouquet’s The Charity of St Martin (1452–1460, the Hours of Etienne Chavalier, the Louvre) and Simone Martini’s fresco in the Lower Church, San Francesco, Assisi, c. 1312. In contrast, Gerard David’s Canon Bernardijn Salviati and Three Saints (after 1501, National Gallery), represents the saint wearing bishop’s robes, with the beggar in the background.
4 For the Rome Prize and Decorative Painting see for instance, Alan Powers, ‘Decorative Painting in the Early Twentieth Century – a Context for Winifred Knights’. In Winifred Knights, 1995, 13–17.
5 For this approach see the author’s doctoral thesis, A Study of Winifred Knights, 1915–1933 (University of East Anglia, November 2015). See also a more recent comment: ‘The conflict between female self-empowerment and subjugation was a recurrent theme [in Knights’ work], explored through women’s relationship to the natural world, to working communities, to marriage, motherhood and death’. Llewellyn, 2016, 10.
6 Letter from Sir Herbert Baker (member of the Milner Memorial Committee) to Dean George Bell, August 1, 1928, in which he says: ‘I have approached Mrs Monnington [Winifred Knights] about the picture and her husband says that she is overjoyed at the prospect of doing it and he believes it will suit her very well.’ Milner Memorial File, Canterbury Cathedral Archives. All quotations from letters between the Milner Memorial Committee and Bell are taken from the collection.
7 Knights to Bell, August 3, 1928. Milner Memorial File. All quotations from letters between Knights and Bell are taken from the collection unless otherwise stated.
8 See Order of Service, Milner Memorial File, Canterbury Cathedral Archives.
9 Alfred Milner was created 1st Viscount Milner in 1902.
10 In conversation between John Monnington and the author, October 16, 2011.
11 Knights’ sketches are in the British Museum Prints and Drawings Collection, Fitzwilliam Museum, University College London Art Museum and two private collections.
12 Probably in 1931 when Knights wrote about her sister’s new baby, ‘a blessed relief that Eileen has deposited her little egg and a fine lusty one at that’. Letter to ‘Auntie G’, University College London Special Collections. All quotations from Knights’ letters are taken from the collection unless otherwise stated.
13 Village Street: Mill-Hands Conversing, 1919, University College London Art Museum; The Deluge, 1920, Tate Collection; The Marriage at Cana, c. 1923, Te Papa Tongarewa Museum collection, Wellington, New Zealand; Santissima Trinita, 1924–1930, private collection; Figures in a Boat, Lake Piediluco (also known as Tranquil Lake and as Edge of Abruzzi: Boat with Three People on a Lake) 1924–1930, private collection (Sacha Llewellyn). The self-portrait is less clear in Knights’ small oil on wood Italian Landscape, 1921, Tate Collection. Knights’ early watercolours include numerous self-portraits, for instance: illustration to ‘Goblin Market’ by Christina Rossetti, c.1915, tondo, UCL Art Museum; The Wise and Foolish Virgins, 1915, James Allen’s Girls’ School.
14 ‘Any design…at any stage’ must be submitted to the Chapter ‘because of the rather special historical marks which [the chapel] contains in the walls’. Bell to Hugh Thornton, member of the Milner Memorial Committee, June 28, 1926.
15 Bell to Knights, October 6, 1928.
16 For instance, Dean Johnson to Hugh Thornton, July 10, 1935. Hewlett Johnson Archive, University of Kent. All further quotations from letters between Johnson and the Milner Memorial Committee are taken from the collection.
17 For example, Knights to Audrey Clarke, undated, annotated ‘most likely late 1915‘; Evelyn Shaw, Secretary to the British School at Rome, based in London, to Knights, September 27, 1923. British School at Rome (known as BSR) Archives.
18 Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini, trans. Mary Caroline Watt, as St Martin of Tours, 1928, 98–100. Knights had read Watt’s translation: she quoted from it in a letter to Bell dated October 12, 1928.
19 The location of the side panel has been unknown since the reredos was removed for restoration in 1990. In Llewellyn, 153.
20 According to Sulpicius Severus, St Martin was already a bishop when he performed this miracle. He was travelling ‘towards the town of Carnutes (Chartres)’. After the child was restored to life many witnesses to the miracle converted to Christianity. Severus, Vita Martini, Dialogue II, Chapter IV, trans. Watt, 211–12.
21 Knights was perhaps influenced by Sulpicius Severus’ comment that Martin ‘had risen to heights above our human nature; strong in his sense of power he utterly despised all earthly glory, he looked to heaven alone.’ Severus, trans Watt, 211.
22 Llewelyn notes that the painting ‘was based on studies that she had made at Lake Piediluco in 1924‘. Llewellyn, 154. From visual evidence the body of water appears more obviously a stream.
23 ‘The galleries here are full of rich treasures and I shall spend a very profitable time here studying.’ Knights to her mother, March 4, 1921.
24 Knights saw the fresco cycle in 1922. See letters: Knights to Evelyn Shaw, June 22, 1922; J.M.B. Benson (Rome Scholar for 1914) to Shaw, July 2, 1922, BSR Archives.
25 These motifs were adapted from the fresco of The Procession of the Queen of Sheba and the Meeting between the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon.
26 Knights to Aunt Millicent, September 29, 1920.
27 Fra Angelico’s painting is another possible source, particularly for her use of colour.
28 Roger Fry, ‘Giotto’, in Vision and Design [1920], 1957, 175. The essay was first published in The Monthly Review in 1901 and in a footnote to the 1920 publication Fry comments on his changed attitude to form, disassociating himself from a former concern with ‘the dramatic idea…it now seems to me possible … to disentangle our reaction to pure form from our reaction to its implied associated ideas’. Fry, 131. Caroline Elam notes that Fry gave two ‘superb’ Cambridge University Extension class lectures on Piero della Francesca in 1901. Caroline Elam, Roger Fry’s Journey: From the Primitives to the Post-Impressionists: The Watson Gordon Lecture 2006, 16.
29 Alice Strickland, ‘Opening Doors’. In Matthew C. Potter, The Concept of ‘The Master’ in Art Education in Britain and Ireland, 1770 to the Present, 137.
30 The letter later annotated as ‘1915, probably October’.
31 Strickland, 141.
32 Emma Chambers writes that Tonks ‘emphasised the value of study from the Old Masters, and students were encouraged to draw from artworks in the National Gallery and British Museum Print Room’. Chambers, ‘Prototype and Perception’. In Potter, The Concept of the Master, 190. Engravings by and after Durer were available in the Print Room, for instance the Virgin kneeling in Durer’s The Nativity, 1504, and Marcantonio Raimondi’s The Nativity, early sixteenth century.
33 Knights had her own style, adapted from the Italian ‘peasant dress’ she admired. Knights to her mother, May 30, 1921. She still wore this style in 1933, asserting personal choice against the norm. Making and adapting clothes was important to Knights. Knights to her mother, December 9, 1924.
34 For Slade students visiting the National Gallery see Chambers, 190.
35 Roger Fry, ‘Paul Cézanne’ [1917], in Vision and Design [1920], 1957, 264. David Peters Corbett describes the status of Fry’s and Bell’s criticism during the 1920s: the ‘influence of the version of modern art which they expounded …concentrating on the technically restrained and on “significant form”, was profound’. In Corbett, The Modernity of English Art, 1997, 76.
36 Knights did not comment on the influence of Fry’s or Bell’s writing, but made occasional references to contemporary art. She wrote on November 18, 1918 of the Armistice (November 11) that ‘I must do a futurist picture of little pairs of smiling eyes…a man dancing the hornpipe, on a taxi-roof…’. Knights to Aunt Millicent, November 18, 1918. The Deluge reveals Vorticist influence, but in the mid-1920s she was more cautious of contemporary art: ‘The students nowadays are all cracked on Picasso who isn’t such a great one at drawing as they all make out [drawing was central to the Slade’s syllabus]’ but Van Gogh is the ‘very best of the French painters’. Knights to Aunt Millicent, 1926.
37 Canterbury College of Art, British Artists in Italy: Rome and Abbey Scholars 1920–1980, 1985. Quoted in Strickland, 141.
38 The British School at Rome, which was founded in 1901, provided finance for art scholars in Decorative Painting from 1913 through the Rome Prize. The scholarship was intended to prepare artists for careers in large-scale public art, including murals. The term Decorative Painting was used in reviews of Knights’ tempera on canvas Village Street: Mill-Hands Conversing (1919, University College London Art Collection) when the painting was on show as part of the first stage of entry for the Rome Prize. The Evening Standard’s reviewer wrote: ‘To a layman Miss W.M. Knights seems to have the most intelligent idea of the conditions of decorative painting…her complete panel…shows a nice idea of how to build up a solid composition in flat tones’. Evening Standard, February 19, 1920. Decorative paintings included rhythmic, repetitive shapes and narrative was often subordinated to patterns of shape and colour. The sub-genre was informed by early Italian art, and use of tempera was therefore popular.
39 For ‘moderate modernism’ see this writer’s doctoral thesis, 93–94, 177. For a similar approach, David Peters Corbett’s ‘revisionist modernism’ in his Modernity of English Art, 57–58, 66–82. Grace Brockington uses the phrase ‘plurality of modernisms’ to avoid privileging the avant-garde over other forms. Brockington, Above the Battlefield, 2010, 222. For a type of moderate modernism in France, Spain and Italy, the ‘call to order’ and associated influence of classical style, see Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, On Classic Ground, 1990.
40 Knights wrote that Stanley Spencer ‘is the most wonderful painter in England now, not even excepting [Augustus] John’. Knights to Aunt Millicent, letter undated, annotated as ‘1926‘. Derwent Lees’ paintings show a similarly ‘decorative’ style to Augustus John’s.
41 Letter from Knights to Bell, April 28, 1929.
42 Severus’ account of St Martin’s miracle is similarly dramatic: ‘a woman carried in her arms the body of her child who had just expired…crying out “…restore my son to me, he is my only child!” All the people added their tears and prayers to hers’. And after seeing the child restored to life ‘the people shouted aloud with great joy’. However, the moment of the child’s revival is described differently, arguably therefore an influence (with ‘decorative painting’) on Knights’ representation: he ‘took the body of the dead child in his arms, and in the sight of all he knelt down. And when he had prayed he calmly rose and restored the living child to its mother.’ Severus, trans. Watt, 211–12. Knights may have seen Sandro Botticelli’s Three Miracles of St Zenobius, a small panel (64.8 x 139.7 cm), c.1500, part of the Mond Bequest donated to the National Gallery in 1924. A mother screams in surprise and delight as St Zenobius revives her dead child. Knights was working for a calmer, more reflective representation.
43 For Milner: Schula Marks and Stanley Trapido, ‘Lord Milner and the South African State’, 1979, 50–80; John Marlow, Milner, Apostle of Empire, 1976; A.N. Porter, ‘Sir Alfred Milner and the Press’, The Historical Journal 16, no. 2, June 1973, 323–39; John Evelyn Wrench, Alfred Lord Milner, 1958.
44 Baker to Bell, July 21, 1926.
45 Baker to Bell, in the letter above, July 21, 1926.
46 ‘he will probably be prepared to do the work for nothing’. Hugh Thornton, member of the Milner Memorial Committee, to Bell, June 21, 1926.
47 The author’s summary of discussions between Bell and the Milner Memorial Committee prior to the approach to Knights is drawn from the Milner Memorial File.
48 Baker to Bell, June 22, 1928.
49 David Young Cameron to Baker, July 16, 1928.
50 Writing in retrospect for The Studio in 1942, Bell said: ‘three things stand out from those years [his years as Dean at Canterbury] from the point of view of the association of religion and art… second the scheme devised by Sir Herbert Baker for the refitting of St Martin’s Chapel in memory of Viscount Milner, including a painting by Mrs Monnington of an altar piece comprising St Martin’s life…it is one of the most lovely, delicate and deeply felt modern religious paintings that I know…’ George Bell, ‘The Church and the Artist’, The Studio 124, no. 594, September 1942, 81. Discussing Bell’s involvement in drama in the Cathedral, also applicable to visual art, Rowan Williams says: ‘Bell’s personal taste was largely (not exclusively) conservative, but in comparison with most of his ecclesiastical contemporaries he was notably adventurous… he was determined to allow artists themselves to set the standards of excellence and acceptability.’ Bishop George Bell Lecture, University of Chichester, October 4, 2008, transcript.
51 Knights’ knowledge of Christianity was typical of her time. See Callum G. Brown, Religion and Society, 2006, 40, 160. There were Scripture lessons at James Allen’s Girls’ School, where Knights studied. Conversation between Cynthia Pullin, Librarian and Archivist, James Allen’s Girls’ School, and the author, July 6, 2011.
52 John Monnington, interviewed by the author, July 19, 2013.
53 Letter from Evelyn Shaw to Winifred Knights, April 29, 1921, BSR Archives.
54 University College London Art Museum holds many examples of Knights’ student work. These, with work by her contemporaries, show responses to the teaching of drawing at the Slade.
55 Knights to Bell, October 12, 1928.
56 In the Fitzwilliam Museum and private collections.
57 Illustrated in Llewellyn, 154.
58 Paul Liss, ‘Catalogue’, in Winifred Knights, 1995, 57. The cartoon was displayed in ‘Winifred Knights’, an exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, June 8 – September 18, 2016, and illustrated in Llewellyn, 162–63.
59 The Times, June 22, 1934. See also a photograph of the reredos, undated, copies in University College Art Museum and a private collection.
60 ‘Thank you very much for the postcards of the Simone Martini frescoes. It is interesting to see them and they will be a great help to me. I had seen a reproduction of the Vision of St Martin before I submitted the first design to Sir Herbert Baker and I was very much influenced by it. I am glad that you have sent me them all for I think they are beautiful. I have seen them but cannot remember them clearly’. Knights to Bell, April 28, 1929.
61 Knights almost certainly adapted this motif from medieval or Renaissance tomb sculpture, where the angel’s gesture symbolizes the new life after resurrection and the curtains those of heaven. She probably, for instance, saw the late 13c tomb of Giovanni Gaetano Orsini in the Lower Church, San Francesco, Assisi. For other examples of the motif see Julian Gardner, The Tomb and the Tiara, 1992. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for clarifying connections between angels and resurrection.
62 For Monnington’s likeness see photograph labelled ‘John Skeaping, Barbara Hepworth, Thomas Monnington and Winifred Knights, British School at Rome ?1925’. UCL Special Collections. For Knights’ mother as the old lady observing the miracle see Liss, 57. Knights’ mother had died in 1931. For the woman to St Martin’s right as a likeness of the artist see Llewellyn, 160.
63 Knights had given herself fair hair in previous, clear self-portraits, for instance: a watercolour of a woman with blonde hair, 1918–1919, tondo, private collection (Catherine Monnington); A Bank Holiday Fair (also known as Ludlow Fair and Cattle Market), 1919, UCL Art Collection and Figures in a Boat, Lake Piediluco.
64 Knights was described as ‘shy… [and a] “little Quakeress”’. Baker to Johnson, October 31, 1933.
65 Simone Martini depicted seven episodes and three miracles. There are further miracles in Severus, Vita Martini.
66 Knights to Aunt Millicent, September 29,1927.
67 Knights to her mother, July 1925.
68 She related her sensations in a letter to Aunt Millicent, March 8, 1928.
69 Knights to ‘Dearest’, undated.
70 See letter from Knights to ‘Auntie G’, Thursday, 1931.
71 This infant feeding regime, followed by more than a generation of mothers, was devised by New Zealander mother-and-baby expert Dr Truby King, published in England in 1921 in his The Expectant Mother and Baby’s First Months.
72 ‘Eileen Palmer, the artist’s sister, wrote to Frances Carey [on January 29, 1989] to explain the background to [the drawings]. She writes: “These beautiful pencil drawings were made by my sister…at our first home in Purley on May 1st 1931, and May 1st 1933 when both our sons were only a few hours old”. She wrote again [on April 28, 1990] to add that “…[the] day-old babes were the models for the central groups”’. Curator’s Comments, Drawings, Winifred Margaret Knights, British Museum Research, Collection Online.
73 Winifred Knights’ second son, John Monnington, was born in June 1934, eight months after the reredos was installed in Canterbury Cathedral.
74 Knights wrote to her aunt Millicent on March 8, 1928 (two months after the birth): ‘I wish I had seen it it [sic] is almost unbelievable that I could have produced anything resembling a human being, and it would have been a comfort in case there is another time.’ For discussion of the impact of stillbirth see for instance: Carol Sanger, “The Birth of Death’: Stillborn Birth Certificates and the Problem for Law’, California Law Review 100, no. 1, February 2012, 269–311; Tim Flor Sorensen, ‘Sweet Dreams: Biographical Blanks and the Commemoration of Children’, Mortality 16, no. 2, May 2011, 167.
75 Knights to Bell, April 28, 1929. In addition, Knights may have considered the symbolism of walnuts: ‘St Augustine compared the walnut to Christ’s redemptive work. He likened the shell to the wood of the Cross; the bitter substance surrounding the nut to Christ’s flesh; and the meat to sweet, divine revelation’. Judith Couchman, The Art of Faith, 2012, 139. Also in Llewellyn, 160.
76 The edges of the walnut tree behind St Martin as an old and a young man make a similar link. According to Sulpicius Severus, Martin was a catechumen (preparing for baptism, or new life) when he came across the beggar. See Knights to Bell, October 12, 1928.
77 For associations between Psalm 23 and ‘the meaning of baptism’, Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, Ravenna in Late Antiquity, 2010, 95.
78 The photograph is in a private collection.
79 Baker to Bell, December 20, 1926.
80 Baker to Bell, October 17, 1927 and May 8, 1928.
81 Baker to Steel-Maitland, May 6, 1929.
82 Tonks to Knights, August 7, 1933, private collection. Quoted in Llewellyn, 167. Knights had lost the regular support of Dean Bell, who had great faith in her work, when he moved to Chichester in 1929.
83 Baker to Johnson, October 26, 1933.
84 Baker to Johnson, October 31, 1933.
85 Knights to Johnson, November 3, 1933.
86 Dean Johnson is known as the ‘Red Dean’ owing to his support for the Soviet Union before, during and after the Second World War. His biographers have titled their books to reflect an association that has become commonplace: John Butler, The Red Dean, 2011; Robert Hughes, The Red Dean: The Life and Riddle of Dr Hewlett Johnson, 1874–1966, Dean of Canterbury 1931–1963, 1987.
87 Hughes, 68–69.
88 Hughes, 73.
89 The Times. June 22, 1934.
90 Johnson to Thornton, July 10, 1935.
91 Johnson to Thornton, June 19, 1936.
92 Writing in retrospect, in 1990, Eileen Palmer wrote: ‘Dean Hewlett Johnson and his second young wife thought it most unsuitable when completed. Driving down to Canterbury with my father-in-law, we were horrified to be directed to the Crypt by a verger, and found my sister’s painting hanging in half-light! Before she… [died] she received a letter from Lady Baker telling of her late husband’s last words “The Reredos must be returned to its rightful place in Saint Martin’s Chapel”’. Palmer to Frances Carey, April 28, 1990, Curator’s Comments.
93 Johnson to Thornton, July 10, 1935.
94 Thornton to Johnson, September 22, 1937.
95 Johnson to Thornton, November 5, 1937. Bell did view the reredos in its original location (it appears that Johnson did not know this), and he wrote to Knights: ‘I know that the Chapter does not at present take the view that it is perfect in its position on the altar: but time and beauty are on your side’. Bell to Knights, May 25, 1934, private collection. Quoted in Llewellyn, 167.
96 Without the missing panel the reredos appeared unbalanced in the exhibition. In contrast, the shape does not appear inappropriate in Canterbury.
97 The painting’s graceful composition has not suffered unduly from the left panel’s loss in 1990, and indeed it now fits easily into the recess behind the altar.
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Notes on contributors
Rosanna Eckersley
Rosanna Eckersley was awarded her PhD by the University of East Anglia in 2015, for a thesis titled ‘A Study of Winifred Knights, 1915–1933ʹ. Her research interests include: inter-war ‘moderate’ modernism; the British School at Rome; women artists in twentieth-century Britain. Rosanna has taught Art History since 1994 and is an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the Open University, a tutor for the WEA, and a freelance lecturer in British art and design.