We look at a portrait and we begin to judge, because human beings are creatures of judgement. We judge the person being painted (a bad king? a good woman?) in the same way that we judge the artist, and occasionally we find ourselves judging them both, particularly when the subject is also the painter: Dame Laura Knight’s self-portrait, a symphony in crimson and vermilion, shows the painter in perfect profile, flanked by the naked flanks of both a model and of the painting of the model. As a woman she was forbidden to attend life-drawing classes, and here she tells us that she is a woman, and
...more
