And this is Charlotte Marsh; she and Selina Martin were arrested and force-fed in November 1909. Charlotte wrote to Selina: ‘Matron comes every day to try and get me to eat but no – she can chase me around my cell! No surrender!’

Every time one thinks, as a fresh realisation, about force-feeding and the suffragettes, one is stunned: that Englishmen should care so much about depriving women of the vote that they would subject them to that! When women had had the vote in New Zealand for twenty-five years! It seems, looking back, totally barmy. But then no barmier in some ways than politics nowadays. This week on the post, a tribute to the suffragettes Selina Martin (seen here) and Charlotte Marsh, details here about the display at the People’s History Museum in Manchester.

And the absolute star of the show/sale: a portrait of Laura Knight by her husband Harold. It’s called Books and was painted in 1926. See you at Sotheby’s in December! (Joke. But let’s go and at least gaze  and admire.)

A watercolour with charcoal and pencil of two Circus Ponies which yet could only have been done by Laura Knight. The estimate is ten to fifteen thousand pounds but it must have been a fairly normal price once because its original purchaser sounds reassuringly ordinary: Mrs Rogers, 10 Cervantes Court, Green Lane, Northwood, not someone who would spend thousands and thousands. Lovely to think of it sitting snugly on a wall in Northwood.

On the Trapeze would be a stimulating picture to have hanging on the wall and in fact if we were the curator of a small museum we would be seriously tempted: the estimate is £8-£12,000. This too haas been in a private collection in America until now. ‘Following an introduction by her friend Alfred Munnings to the famous circus impresario Bertram Mills, Knight was given access to all backstage areas of the circus and became as much a member of the troupe as the performers’ (Catalogue).

There are a dozen other Laura Knight paintings in the Sotheby’s December 13th sale, all rather wonderful. Tell Your Fortune, Lady? is undated and its provenance was unknown until it was first sold in Chicago in 1996. She ‘painted more than sixty pictures of the Gypsy women who told fortunes and sold handicrafts at the race meetings at Epsom and Ascot, from a makeshift studio in the back of a rented Rolls-Royce. The present picture depicts a scene behind a beer-tent at the races with one of the clairvoyants and her infant’ (Catalogue here).

Laura Knight has always been a favourite on the Post, although regular readers will know that in some ways we prefer the work of her husband Harold Knight. But she was undeniably a great painter (and he may be a more minor one, in the scheme of things) and next month (on December 13th) Sotheby’s are selling some of her work. It is glorious. This is Motley, Preparing for Her Entrance 1928 (estimate £100,000-£150,000) which has been owned by the Hoover family in America ever since they first acquired it. The  Sotheby’s catalogue note says: ‘Motley was painted in Knight’s studio at 1 Queens Road, St John’s Wood, which she transformed into a dressing room for the circus-stars who had finished their season at Olympia in Kensington but stayed in London to pose for the picture. An Irishwoman called Nan Kearns, who was posing as the dresser and would later become a film actress, fed everyone with food from the Cookery School on the Finchley Road. The studio was crowded and alive with chatter as Knight worked. In the chapter titled “Motley” in her autobiography Knight described this time  “I  tried to dissociate myself from the gaiety, but it was overwhelming. The young people were having the time of their lives, and Nan in her Irish way drove her load of fun over us all like a car or juggernaut” (Laura Knight Oil Paint and Grease Paint 1936 p.316).’ More details at the Sotheby’s site here.