ART HISTORY
Ruby Loftus Screwing a
Beech Ring played into a
key interest in Dame Laura’s
work: the roles people play
with little money, so it was a great turn
of fate that she was able to register as
an “artisan” student and avoid fees.
Unfortunately, as this all took place
in 1890, the young artist was denied
access to life painting classes, which
were considered indecent for women
to attend. “She wasn’t out of her
depth, she held her own, but it must
have been quite a daunting thing,”
says Dr Morden. She was furious to
be told she didn’t have a “woman’s
hand” and that she must develop
feminine gestures in her brushwork.
With no interest in being relegated to
a separate standard of painting, she
found her way by ingratiating herself
with the men in the class, asking
questions and seeking support from
star pupil Harold Knight, the Vermeer-
inspired portrait artist who would
become her husband in 1903.
Together they visited several
artists’ colonies, evenutally settling
in the Newlyn School in Cornwall. It’s
a period that saw substantial change
in Dame Laura’s work, one that
Dr Morden partly attributes to the
emergence of cinema as a new form
of entertainment. “I think [cinema]
was a certain threat to artists at the
time,” she explains. “Her business
was to try at one stage to capture the
idea of quivering movement, rather
than something that was static and
solid and three-dimensional.”
Those cinematic quivers can be
seen in The Cornish Coast, a warm,