Les laveuses

Les laveuses marks a turning point in Knight’s career. He has largely abandoned images based on literary sources in favor of a paintings depicting the working poor of rural France. This shift in subject matter may  have been inspired by Jean-François Millet, the Barbizon painter whose images of peasant life were fresh in the public mind…

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Les fugitifs

Les Fugitifs is typical of the anecdotal and literary scenes that Knight had begun to paint in Philadelphia in the late 1860s. Like Othello in the House of Brabantio (1871) or The Old Gallant (1872), Les Fugitifs appears to be based on a literary source, in this case Sir Walter Scott’s medieval tales. It is full…

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