A Scene in a Village Street with Millhands Conversing 1919

Winifred Knights captured this scene in a village street, with millhands conversing, using muted colours, and a pared-down, figurative style. I can only imagine what she was thinking when she made it. There is a great feeling of peace and quiet – an everyday street scene frozen in time. The paint looks thin, almost like tempera, and the forms are simplified. The figures are arranged very deliberately, almost like a tableau vivant, their clothes and faces capturing that interwar period between the great wars. The architecture is also carefully observed and abstracted. Note, for instance, the shadow cast by the house on the right, and how it has been transformed into a graphic shape. You can sense a connection to early Italian Renaissance painting. A kind of pictorial space and stillness that feels very modern and yet also classical. It is these conversations with the past which keep painting alive, finding new ways of seeing and feeling.