Laura Knight

Dame Laura Knight was an English painter who trained at Nottingham School of Art and became one of the best-known British artists of the twentieth century. Her subjects ranged from theatre, ballet and circus performers to working people, and in 1936 she became the first woman for more than 150 years to be elected a full Royal Academician.

During the Second World War Knight received official commissions to record aspects of the national war effort. Her paintings of women at work included Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-ring, an image of a young factory worker performing highly skilled engineering work. After the war she also recorded the Nuremberg trials, combining the courtroom with the devastation of the city outside.

In Clare Harvey’s The Night Raid, Laura Knight is a central historical character sent to Nottingham ordnance works to paint female factory workers. The novel builds its fictional story around Knight’s documented wartime commissions and her artistic interest in working women, while the principal factory workers and their private relationships are invented.