Dame Laura Knight: Nottingham's unsung heroine who became the first woman elected into the Royal Academy of Arts

Nottingham has a habit of playing down its heroes and famous people. Where other towns and cities proudly proclaim their famous sons and daughters, we tend to take an understated approach to such statements.

You might have ridden on a tram that bears the name Dame Laura Knight. But do you know who she was or why she was so special?

Did you know that Laura Knight, known as the ‘grand old lady of the Art World’, is one of Britain’s most celebrated artists? That she was the first woman to be fully elected to the prestigious Royal Academy? The first artist to be made a Dame?

And all of that from very humble beginnings, and a formative period falling in an era when women were treated as imposters in the art world - part of the “female invasion” artist George Dunlop Leslie once bemoaned.

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Born in Long Eaton, baby Laura’s father abandoned the family in the first months of her life, leaving them alone and hard-pressed for money.

After a tough, tumultuous childhood involving several moves, including a time living on Noel Street, Laura’s mother Charlotte eventually secured a teaching job at the old Nottingham Art School.

The school was based in the beautiful Waverley Building just next to the entrance to the Arboretum. Today it is part of NTU’s Nottingham School of Art and Design.

Young Laura began to accompany her mother to the school, walking the short distance from their house on Tennyson Street. And soon thanks to some maternal help, Laura enrolled at the school as a student.

Here’s another record for the future Dame: at 13 Laura was the youngest student ever to enrol at the school. But she could hardly expect to be considered a full student, not just for her age, but because she was a girl. For example, no women or girls were allowed to paint nude models from life.

The art world authorities at the time deemed painting from casts the only suitable solution. But Laura pressed on. She studied, developed her artistic skills, and grew into a woman while she was at the school. She even took over her mother’s teaching role there, after the devastation of losing her to cancer at just 16.

It was the start of a stunning and influential career that took her to the heights of the art world. Laura Knight as she became, after marrying her Nottingham Art School sweetheart Harold Knight, would see the world as a painter.

She would visit and capture marginalised people, leading to one of her most renowned paintings of Gypsy communities in England. Later she attributed her love of the community, and her early fascination with fantastic colours and sights, to happy childhood memories at Goose Fair.

She would break boundaries with her bold nude paintings, one of the first of a new wave of women painting women on their own terms - and not from a cast.

Laura Knight became Dame Laura in 1929. And as a noted and now honoured artist, her influence and acclaim grew.

Her art continued along many of its original lines: nudes, Gypsy peoples, ballet dancers, and the lives of rural communities.

But she would also visit some of the darkest places in the human mind through her astonishing painted accounts of the 1946 Nuremberg Trials, and the horrors of war seen from the perspectives of soldiers and airmen.

Her WWII work also documented the increasing role women were playing in the fight both at home and abroad, in the armed forces and in the factories.

In 1965, shortly after the death of her beloved Harold, Dame Laura’s work was honoured in a major retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was the first time a woman’s collection had been made into a major exhibition of this kind.

And Dame Laura kept on painting right until the end, at the age of 93. By then she had made a staggering contribution to the art world, and to women, and to Nottingham.

So give a nod to Laura if you find yourself riding the tram that bears her name. And the next time you’re at Lakeside Arts on the University of Nottingham campus, take a minute to gaze up at a grand, striking family portrait hanging in the Djanogly Gallery café.

The artist, the ‘grand old lady of the Art World’, donated that to the university in 1968.