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Lot 98AR
Dame Laura Knight, RA, RWS(British, 1877-1970)Mickey and his Moke
27 September 2023, 14:00 BST
London, New Bond Street£12,000 - £18,000
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Dame Laura Knight, RA, RWS (British, 1877-1970)
Mickey and his Moke
signed and dated 'Laura Knight/1962' (lower left)
oil on canvas
96.5 x 83.8cm (38 x 33in).
signed and dated 'Laura Knight/1962' (lower left)
oil on canvas
96.5 x 83.8cm (38 x 33in).
Footnotes
Provenance
Sotheby's, London, Artist's Estate Sale, July 1971, lot 85.
With Phillips and Sons, Marlow.
Private collection, UK.
Exhibited
London, Upper Grosvenor Gallery, 1969, no. 2, owned by the artist.
Nottingham, Nottingham Castle Museum, 1970, no. 37, owned by the artist.
The present lot was painted in 1962, based on sketches held by the artist from her original work A Man from Mousehole which was painted in 1928, exhibited at The Leicester Galleries, London (cat. no. 25) and illustrated in the artist's first autobiography, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (p. 369); the work was also illustrated in The Sphere on 17th March 1928, just prior to the exhibition, but under the title of Stonebreaker.
On 17th December 1929 the S.S. Manulka of the Union Steam Ship Company sank in darkness and heavy fog approximately 70 miles south of Dunedin on her way from Melbourne Australia to Wellington New Zealand. All the passengers were saved, but most of the cargo went down with the ship, including a consignment of the artist's pictures that included A Man from Mousehole.
Differing in the background, both depict an almost identical scene of a Cornish farm worker sat with folded arms - subsequently identified as Mr Johns (Witt library) - together with his working beast of burden, a donkey. In the original work lost at sea, the background depicts the local Cornish landscape with a tin mine on top of a hill, whereas this picture has simply a door and brick wall as a background.
We are grateful to John Croft for his assistance in cataloguing this lot. The present lot is listed in the online catalogue of Laura Knight's work, under cat. no. 0616.