Winifred Knights’ Mirage of Cana

Winifred Knights was in a funk. ‘I am exasperated by this beastly school, how I hate it and all the people in it,’ she wrote her mother, on 22 March 1921. This down-beat note differs considerably from the effusive bon mots of earlier letters in which ‘Winks’ related all the ways in which her Rome impressions were ‘delicious’, ‘lovely’, ‘tremendous’ and ‘splendid’.

Even allowing for the convention of niceties, one might surmise that something intervened between Knights’ arrival in Italy in November 1920 and this infuriated account in March 1921. A hint might be in a letter of May 1921 in which she thanks her mother for allowing ‘Arnold’ (Mason, her betrothed) to travel to Rome and assist in saving ‘a lot of bother’ with ‘men all willing to fall in love’. Underlining the remark, she reports ‘An engagement ring is no protection from Artists.’ Another hint at her growing dissatisfaction might be read in her letter of March 1921, when she admits to feeling ‘miserable sometimes because I can’t start work …’ Some five months into her residency she still was struggling to find the inspiration she expected in her new Italian setting.

Knights, the first woman to be awarded a scholarship to undertake research and practice of ‘Decorative Painting’ at the prestigious British School at Rome (BSR), was in search of her Italian idyll and subject. Incubated in the atmosphere of the Piero della Francesca mania which gripped her teachers and mentors Roger Fry, Carl Tancred Borenius and Clive Bell, Knight was fretting that she might never get on with her work unless she could look upon the master’s frescos. They were in Arezzo. Instead, there she was. Stuck. In dusty, honey-tinged Rome, when all she wanted was to gaze upon the chalky, calm, mute colours of the sun-bleached campagnas of Abruzzo, Umbria and Arezzo, where Piero had trod before.  

The Piero quest was a rite of passage for the pilgrims of the Slade School of Art, like Knights, and others who sought to learn from scrutinising the motionless groups, strict geometries, arid landscapes, and peculiarly sacred secular atmospheres conjured by the quattrocento artist in his stylised pictures. All the scholarship artists at the BSR were encouraged to go independently hither and gather their impressions. At least if you were a fellow. Different rules perhaps applied to their first woman artist. What to do? It might be supposed that stricter social controls were applied to a lone female amongst the beasties.

Not one to be deterred, Knights grabbed her large peasant hat, sketch book, adventurism and scampered off with the impetuous John Benson in May 1922 to study Piero’s Legend of the True Cross, 1452–66 murals in Basilica San Francesco, Arezzo. Her escapade attracted the ire of the head of school and a letter was sent forth to admonish her – to which she replied, ‘I am very sorry….’ Contrite, but not controlled, and not cowered either.

This sojourn clearly gave her the confidence and instilled in her the inspiration to pursue her behemoth – she commenced The Marriage at Cana, 1923 shortly afterwards. The close study helped set her palette and offered confirmation of her schema, fastidiously drafted in preliminary sketches, emphasising strict, vertiginous, perpendicularity throughout. But instead of delivering a work of Piero-infused serenity, she delivers a work of perplexing rumination. A puzzle of a work. A play of actors and quiet fuming, set in a theatre of authoritarian delineation.

In The Marriage at Cana, Piero and his inspirations lurk in plain sight. Perhaps less obvious, although very important, are the lessons acquired from looking at the work of Giotto in Assisi, where the school went on a study picnic. Giotto’s plump, bell-jar figures are echoed by Knights. She recreates his figures’ sloping shoulders with smooth ubiquitous cardigans – an attire synonymous with Knights’ own style. In the scattered marginalia of Knights’ scene, beyond the atmospheric tension of the main groups, we can also observe figurative debris from her sketches of sleeping (these will be repurposed for her later work The Santissima Trinita, 1924–30) and recreational people in private reveries. Hints of Georges Seurat, Frederic Leighton and various studies made from her time in Anticoli commingle.

Knights’ biography and thoughts are available to researchers. A prolific correspondent to her mother, aunt and others, numerous letters have been archived and are held in the Slade, BSR and University College London collections. It is easy to read into her painting via her chronicles. The impenetrable atmosphere of The Marriage at Cana is made delicious and juicy with her own gossip.[1]

From Knights’ own accounts we know she is put-upon by the amorous advances of her confrères. We also know she is very aware of her appearance and is keen to discuss food, fashion and fun. Her ‘peasant hat’ is an important and flamboyant acquisition – its circumference wide enough to keep people at a distance. She wears a mask during a ‘ball’ all night – another distancing strategy, not without its tantalising mystery. Dalliances are hinted at. Arnold comes and goes. Her future husband Tom Monnington makes an appearance. The painting has been mined for all these references and more.

But I am attracted to the photograph of Knights sitting in her Rome school studio, one previously occupied by Colin Gill, now fitted out by she and Arnold. It is a lofty space full of expansive potential. It provides visible clues not necessarily put down on writing paper and dispatched to her readers.

In Knights’ monastic white space sits The Marriage at Cana in its naked, under-painted, sketched-up state on an easel. Cropped by the framing of the photograph, only a small slice of its two-metre width can be seen. Photographed in 1923, a year after lamenting to her mother that she couldn’t start her work, the epic painting is still in preparation and flux. We can observe the mysterious stairs in the alcove room, at the top right of the work, in her cartoon, still awaiting paint in 1923. Designed to create a sense of perspectival depth, the steps disappear entirely in the final painting. From other photographs we can see Knights was preoccupied by the upper right-hand corner, making constant revisions in the preliminary drawings. She painted it in first ­­– perhaps to quell any further doubt.

At the time of the photograph, peculiar architectural and wood-grain elements have been painstakingly detailed in the foreground of the visible underwork. They appear almost like rippling water in the eventual version we see today. The plank over which one might walk onto the ‘island’ scene emphasises the floating, surreal theatre of the picture and confirms a sense of being cloistered inside a moat, inside a dream. Which would also account for the multiple ‘Winifreds’ deposited in the painting’s ‘scenes’, as happens in episodic dreaming.

Most intriguing is the scale and shape of the work. ‘Decorative Painting’– the impetus for the scholarship, funded by a school more interested in archaeology – was in service of the embellishment of architecture. Friezes, panels, and narrative ‘decorations’ were required for churches, schools, town halls and guilds. Colour, form and perspective were important traits of these works, which needed to settle into architectural space. At the very edge of Knights’ Marriage, as seen in the studio photograph, it is clear she is attempting to create a slice of trompe l’oeil framing to magically marry with an existing piece of architectural moulding.  

In the photograph Knights sits pensively. Her pose confirms her usual tactic of looking down and seeming demure – a strategic deportment to deflect from her formidable stature when standing. Here, eyes lowered, it also serves to suggest her difficult relationship to the painting. Has she perhaps come to the realisation that the square format is less adaptable to decorative work? After all, her fellow Rome scholars opted for the rectangular shape – Colin Gill’s Allegro, 1920–21 (in which Knights is pictured holding a cage with a bird – a reference to Gill’s sonnet to her, in which he writes, ‘you hold my heart like a bird in a cage’[2]) and Monnington’s Allegory, circa 1924 (which pairs Knights and himself as Adam and Eve) being two examples.

Rectangles haunt Knights’ thoughts and find their way into her schema as angular tables and long stools, tipping extravagantly in the space towards the viewer. They are reiterated in the moat pools that separate the garden from the main scenes of feasting In this dream of many parts, Knights cannot settle on one position or another; she moves between rectangles, spaces and subjects. The ‘miracle’ at the heart of the story of The Marriage at Cana, in which Jesus turns water into wine, is but a mirage in her painting – put there for its hint at the ecclesiastical and to indicate she had undertaken the proper course of study for a budding ‘decorative’. It’s all prop glasses and food (like the one set aside as a still-life study in Knights’ studio). No competition for the unrestful thoughts that impinge on Knight, which have seeped into her wonderful and compelling omnibus of a work.

Many suppose that Knights struggled to find patronage for a ‘decorative’ commission when she returned to England because by then she was embroiled in establishing her married life with Tom Monnington, and misogyny reigned supreme. That may be so. But it may equally be that her calling-card work – The Marriage at Cana – did not have the requisite architectural shape looked for by those establishing buildings to decorate.

When eventually she did acquire a commission, it was for an altarpiece in the Canterbury Cathedral, titled Scenes from the Life of Saint Martin of Tours, 1928–33. Rectangular in shape, it resolves her struggle with making episodic scenes spatially cohesive in the manner of quattrocento panels. Lovely though it is, it lacks the enigmatic power of Marriage. We can be grateful that the earlier painting remained a stand-alone easel work – the better to ponder its cryptic subjects, its strange aura of discontent and its miraculous presence. Not to mention its triumphant homage to the understated cardigan.

[1] All letters quoted are reproduced in Emly Rothschild, ‘A Scholar Abroad: The British School at Rome in Winifred Knights Letters Home’, in Winifred Knights 1899–1947, the Fine Arts Society PLC in Association with the British School at Rome, London and Rome, 1995, pp 19–22.

[2] Quoted in Paul Liss, British Murals & Decorative Painting 1910–1970, Liss Fine Art and The Fine Art Society, London, 2013, p 19