Laura Knight

In 1936 Laura Knight was elected a full member of the Royal Academy in London, the first woman admitted since it was founded in 1768. She had reached that point from a hard start, trained in Nottingham after her mother, who taught art to keep the family afloat, died while Laura was still a teenager.

She painted what she wanted to be near. In Cornwall she joined the Newlyn School, painters who worked outdoors in the sea light, and made bright pictures of cliffs and bathers. Then she followed the travelling circus and the ballet for years, sketching backstage among the acrobats, clowns and dancers, drawn to performers at work.

The Second World War made her an official war artist. She painted women building aircraft in the factories, and in 1946 she was sent to the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders, where she sat in the courtroom and drew the defendants in the dock, then set that scene against a burning ruined city behind them. Her 1913 self-portrait, showing her at the easel with a nude model, had once been called vulgar for its frankness. It now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.