Painting The Nuremberg Trial: Laura Knight's 1946 Official Commission

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the career of Dame Laura Knight, arguably among the most famous female painters in the early-twentieth century. She was the first woman honored with full election to the Royal Academy of Arts, and the first female painter to be presented with a Damehood. Despite such prominence during her lifetime, scholarship on the painter has declined significantly since her death in 1970. Although new literature has emerged in recent years intent on reassessing the role of female artists throughout history, few have undertaken such work on Knight’s career. The existing body of literature primarily attends to her commercial career painting the ballet, circus, and theater, with little consideration of her wartime period. Painting The Nuremberg Trial: Laura Knight’s 1946 Official Commission undertakes a critical re-examination of her commission to document the Nuremberg Trial in 1946, contributing to the limited scholarship on her wartime commissions for the British Government during and immediately after the Second World War. By closely examining the diary she kept at Nuremberg, this thesis exposes an amateur and apolitical understanding of the war and trial proceedings. I argue that she approached the event with a foremost interest in the visual spectacle and the human drama of her subjects. She kept a distance from the legal proceedings in order to prioritize her own artistic documentation of the event. Her writings, broadcast, studies, and The Nuremberg Trial (1946), collectively constitute a valuable, unique account of the trial through the detached lens of a prominent visual documentarian.