Word: laura
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...modern England does not produce great painters was partly explained by England's greatest living woman painter this week when Dame Laura Knight, first and only full-fledged female member of the Royal Academy, published her autobiography...
...Laura Johnson was born into a family of hard, violent Derbyshire folk who prospered in its lace industry. The women of Laura's family uniformly felt profound contempt for their husbands, and she grew up in a household of six women and an uncle. Her bitter great-grandmother, hearing of her husband's death, tried to cross England in time to slap his dead face before he was buried. Her mother's marriage, writes the daughter, was "an unhappy one," and when her father died soon after Laura's birth, everybody said...
...Laura's mother taught the girl that the two most important things in life were to paint and to be independent. Laura tried to draw from early childhood. Sent to her aunt's in St. Quentin, she copied portraits in the illustrated magazines of French generals and statesmen. Back in Nottingham at the Art School, she was barred from life classes because they were open only to men, was put to drawing from plaster casts. The local burghers invariably called her worst pictures masterpieces, tried to get her to do their portraits. Self-supporting in Nottingham, she gave...
Nottingham's famed Goose Fair, a combination of autumn market, circus and racetrack, left the happiest childhood impression on Laura, had much to do with her delighted discovery of circus subjects soon after the War. She traveled with circuses, became the firm friend of England's late great clown, Whimsical Walker, and a dappled grey circus horse named Hassan, both of whom she repeatedly painted. Of the circus she says: "I love the freedom of it all. . . . The flapping of canvas is like the sound of gunshot- there's nothing in the world to compare with...
...brother, Hale, 12 years his elder, an actor who in 1910 starred in Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, later went into the movies. John Hamilton graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1913, got his law degree from Chicago's Northwestern University three years later. Before graduation he married Laura Hall, daughter of a wealthy Kansas printer, after graduation settled briefly in Kansas City, Mo. before moving back to Topeka...