Exhibitions 2
Landscapes by Charles Knight (Chris Beetles Ltd, 8 & 10 Ryder Street, St James's, SW1, till 4 July)
Harmonising the accidental
Andrew Lambirth
Looking at the work of the Sussex painter Charles Knight (1901-1990), one's first thought is of the great watercolours of John Sell Cotman. It's probably unfair to Knight to pigeonhole him in this way, but he did choose Cotman as his model and set himself to master his techniques, even if later he tried to expand his technical range. There is no point in searching Knight's oeuvre for avant-garde tendencies, for he frankly disdained the overtly modern; but the slightly carping and supercilious view of Knight as a good artist 'in the tradition' will not do either. Charles Knight was a solid landscape painter whose work is lastingly pleasurable, and that in itself is no mean achievement.
The Knight family had farmed for gener- ations, and though Charles's father was an accountant by profession, he was also a naturalist and amateur painter. Early on, Charles Knight showed more than an ordi- nary artistic ability, and developing his flair he began to study seriously, ending up a student at the Royal Academy Schools. The considerable technical facility he soon achieved stayed with him throughout his life, nurtured by the example of Gainsbor- ough and Clausen, and a memorable encounter with Sickert. Whilst maintaining a firm base in Sussex (he lived there all his life), Knight began to travel, first into Som- erset and then to France. He was by no means a stay-at-home, painting widely in Wales, Devon and Scotland, and in old age visiting Yugoslavia (1977) and Brunei (1981).
Right from the start there was a demand for his work as a landscape painter and architectural draughtsman. The contempo- rary taste for Cotman and other painters of the Norwich School, fed by a large Cotman exhibition in 1922, inspired in Knight a rel- ish for classical design which verges on the abstract. Many of his pictures are devoid of people, largely because without the human element he could suggest the timelessness of landscape, the structure of it, which attracted him. Knight grew adept at emu- lating the flat interlocking shapes of Cot- man's compositions, varied by using a rough-textured paper to achieve an oat- meal look.
The current exhibition of more than 140 items by Charles Knight at the Chris Bee- tles gallery does not show the artist to best advantage. Paintings are hung closely from floor to ceiling, and, if you try to move back to look, you'll probably bump into a noxious nude bronze by the late Sydney Harpley. Downstairs the atmosphere increasingly resembles a crowded stock room, and many pictures are difficult to see. Given all that, the show is still impres- sive, and is well supported by David Woot- ton's catalogue, good value at £15. A number of paintings have been borrowed, including the tour-de-force in oils of Ditch- Lastingly pleasurable: 'Headland, 1931, by Charles Knight ling Beacon from the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, where the exhibition has already been shown. Many more are for sale, with subtle evocations of light over blue remembered hills, sea-light or gra- cious mists, interspersed with finely drawn buildings. Lapping washes of colour give way to the greater definition of pen and ink; touches of shocking cerulean add a welcome unpredictability; in the ruins of Tintern Abbey the emerald green is sur- prisingly riotous.
It is by his watercolours that Charles Knight will ultimately be judged. Water- colour, that essentially English medium, which is so bound up with national identity and the way we view our landscape. As the great Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana wrote: 'England is pre- eminently a land of atmosphere. A lumi- nous haze permeates everywhere, softening distances, magnifying perspectives, transfig- uring familiar objects, harmonising the accidental, making beautiful things magical and ugly things picturesque.' These are the qualities which nourished Charles Knight's art, and to which, in the best of his paint- ings, he gave poignant expression.
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