Title - A Dull Day at Epsom

Artist - Dame Laura Knight

The present picture, painted from the open door of Sully’s Rolls Royce circa 1940, captures the excitement of race-day, with one spectator standing on the roof of her car to watch the horses as they gallop past and another scrambling up the back of his vehicle with binoculars clasped to his eyes. The grandstand and its crowd dominates the background but the empty foreground behind the line of cars parked behind the press-tent, demonstrates Knight’s ability to place herself in a more ‘backstage’ setting, just as she did when she painted ballerinas and circus performers in their dressing-rooms or behind the curtain of an auditorium. These pictures convey the more intimate scenes that Knight was able to witness, as an accepted part of the peripheral life of the racing community and not simply an observer viewing from a physical and social distance. Unlike Munnings, who concentrated on painting the grandeur of the winning-enclosure and the energy of the horses with their flared nostrils at the starting-line, Knight was as interested in the spectators naturally observed.