Winifred Knights was born in London in 1899. From her early to her late teens, she is known to have produced a vast number of illustrative drawings, especially inspired by fairy tales such as the Brothers Grimm. She studied at the Slade in the period 1915-17 and 1918-20. Her teachers included Henry Tonks and Frederick Brown and she personified the Slade School tradition under their reign. She was renowned as one of the Slade’s most striking beauties. Arnold Mason, Colin Gill and Tom Monnington all fell under her spell. She won a number of prizes, including the Slade’s 1919 Summer Composition Prize with her Mill Hands on Strike. The following year, she was one of the four finalists of the 1920 Rome Scholarship for Decorative Painting (and they were all Slade students: Knights, James Wilkie, Leon Underwood and Arthur Outlaw). To compete for the Scholarship they were asked to paint a scene of The Deluge, in oil or tempera, 6 X 5 ft, which had to be completed in a period of eight weeks (commencing 5 July). The panel of ten judges included George Clausen, John Singer Sargent, Philip Wilson Steer, and David Young Cameron. Winifred Knights’ remarkable prize-winning composition The Deluge (1919) may be found in the collection of the Tate. In those days, Slade students were encouraged to make a large number of preparatory drawings for Summer Composition paintings, including compositional studies and figure drawings. Knights prepared her submission for the Rome scholarship in like manner. Her designs for The Deluge went through several versions, one including a foreground scene of Noah and his family loading the animals onto the Ark, but in the end, as she ran out of time, she was compelled to simplify the composition. In the foreground of her painting, people flee the rising waters towards the high ground, while Noah’s Ark floats serenely in the distance to the right. The artist’s mother modelled for the central figure carrying a baby and Mason for the male figure beside her and the man shinning up the hill. The artist portrayed herself as the figure to the centre right of the foreground. According to Eileen Palmer, the Flood water was modelled on Clapham Common. Knights’ style was much influenced by the Italian Primitives and she was one of several British artists who participated in a revival of religious imagery in the 1920s, while retaining some elements of a modern style. She was staying was staying with Mason at his studio, The Old Mill, Ludlow, in September 1920, when she received news that she had won the Prix de Rome. Prior to setting out for Italy, Mason and Knights became engaged. Knights spent the next five years in Rome. Anticoli Corrado, a small village south of Rome had, since the 19th-century, been popular with Italian painters. Following in the footsteps of Colin Gill, the first Rome Scholar, Knights and Job Nixon spent the summer months of their scholarship there. Knights would write to her mother on 22 January 1921; ‘Anticoli is a glorious place and a little terrifying, so wild and rugged with huge volcanic mountains all round. I have never imagined a more beautiful place. It hardly seems real. We saw Anticoli just springing up out of the precipice like a bundle of toadstools, all grey houses with green moss covered roofs.’In a letter dated 10 August 1921 Knights refers to Mason staying with her at Anticoli Corrado: ‘Arnold put all his sketches on the wall today. He has over 30 most of them beauties .. I have bought a lovely coral necklace a beauty.’ However, the romance with Mason did not endure, probably because of the presence in Rome of fellow Rome Scholar Tom Monnington. Knights and Monnington were married in Rome on 23 April 1924. In an undated manuscript in the archives of the British School at Rome, Monnington recounted: ‘On her return to England, she completed, after months of work, a picture for which she had made many studies in Italy. She gave it the title of The Santissima Trinita. Knights returned to the Slade in the years 1926-27 and exhibited at both the Imperial Gallery in Kensington and the Duveen Gallery. In the period 1928-33 Knights executed the mural St Michael Dividing his Cloak for the Milner Memorial Chapel of Canterbury Cathedral. In 1929 Knights was elected to the New English Art Club, but never exhibited with them. In the 1930s she and Monnington collaborated with the Swedish interior designer Rolf Engströmer (1892-1970) and the Italian decorator Peter Malacrida (1889-1980 on the restoration of historic Eltham Palace. One of Knights’ principal works was The Marriage at Caana for the British School at Rome, now in the National Gallery of New Zealand at Wellington. Knights died in London in 1947 at the age of 48. In 1947 Mason exhibited a posthumous portrait at the Royal Academy, The Late Winifred Knights. Knights’ tragically early death undoubtedly denied her a place as one of the most important female British artists of the 20th century. Her pencil on paper landscape sketch Anticoli Corrado (1921) may be found in the collection of Manchester Art Gallery.