And finally Women in a Gymnasium 1940, also at Newcastle, at the Laing. Again this painting doesn't look much at first glance but when you examine it... A reader wrote to tell us: 'This painting brought back so many memories! Although it pre-dates my own mother joining in the late 1950s, it’s a Women’s League of Health and Beauty Class, started by Mary Bagot Stack in the 1930s. I well remember my mother’s white satin top and and black satin knickers. We lived in Carlisle at the time she joined and the League put on demonstrations, with club swinging, ribbons etc. I remember as an eight year-old thinking it all looked wonderfully glamorous!'

July Flower was painted in 1942. It doesn't look much but IRL might be much brighter and more interesting. It was sold for c. £200 in 2008. Here is Eleanor Best's biography taken from Wikipedia: born in Hampshire, she went to the Slade in 1909. She continued to live in London throughout her life and settled in Richmond,  exhibiting at the Royal Academy several times (hardly surprising!) and at many other places. The rest is silence, as we have said so often we have said before. 

Eleanor Best's Winter Sunlight was painted in 1940 and is at the Laing Art Gallery, for whom it was bought by the excellent and still flourishing Contemporary Arts Society.

Woman with a Duster apparently dates from 1925 since it was bought by The Atkinson in Southport. Alas, it probably languishes in their basement, certainly it doesn't come up if you search for it on the Atkinson site. But it should be brought up from the underworld into the light. A painting like this says so much: the apron, the duster, the boring monotony of cleaning, and yet with coal fires the dust was appalling, the symbolism of the clock ticking one's life away while one uses it – to dust, the mirror over the fireplace reflecting a small painting  – oh there is so much to think about. And there it is in the basement.

A neglected female artist – have we or have we not heard that phrase before?! This is Eleanor Best (1875-1957) and this 1941 painting is called Here is the News and it's at Newport Museum and Art Gallery. What a gem! A novel all on it's own. Look at the incredible detail. Making a comparison with Vermeer would not be far-fetched. Please please write to us if anyone knows who Eleanor Best was.

This is one of the best known circus paintings from the 1930s - The Trick Act, which is at Touchstones, Rochdale. There was recently a good piece about Laura Knight here.

The circus dinner service was of course based on Laura Knight's long love affair with the circus. Her interest began in the mid 1920s and in 1929 she joined the Mills and Carmo Company on tour for the summer season, in order to devote her time entirely to drawing scenes from daily life under the big top. The clowns in this painting were her friends Randy, Marba and Joe Bert. The painting was purchased from the artist by the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery in 1934, the year she designed the dinner service.