American Painting and Sculpture

DANIEL RIDGWAY KNIGHT
(American, 1839-1924)

The Morning Rose, 1893
Oil on canvas
Gift of Mrs. Hattie Bishop Speed 1928.27

Although American by birth, Daniel Ridgway Knight was French in spirit. He began his artistic training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, but spent most of his professional life in France depicting peasants at work in the fields or at rest along the banks of the Seine River. Like the Impressionists, Ridgway Knight demonstrated an interest in the effects of light; he once built a glass studio where he could paint his models in sunlight, even in the dead of winter. Unlike the Impressionists, however, Ridgway Knight’s subjects remained distinctly sentimental. He clothed his models in authentic garb obtained from local villagers, but his idealized peasants rarely reflected the harsh realities of life experienced by the rural poor. The wooden shoes, worn clothes, and the sickle held by the woman in The Morning Rose, for example, scarcely speak of hardship in this fertile, Eden-like setting.