Laura Knight pinxit - horses & circuses

Salvete omnes,

let us move away from Polish history tonight and canter closer to our times - XX century Britain.

when I was a kid, several times a year our town would receive a visit  from a wondering' circus on their country-wide, year long circuit - each visit being full of clowns, acrobats and above everything many animals, wild or beautiful or both - :) .
I used to love watching various wild and domestic animals perform tricks and drills, from Asiatic elephants, African lions, Siberian tigers and other wild cats, monkeys, seals, or just our old good dogs and birds doing various tricks, and finally a big number of each show;  teams of horses and equestrian acrobatics performed by most graceful and agile gymnasts on top of these well-trained and beautiful steeds.

In this spirit I wanted to bring to my blog the art of Laura Knight, British painter of the late XIX and most of the XX century, especially Ms Knight's equestrian art.

-Circuses, horses and acrobats & clowns -

-Gypsy and other  horse scenes from the bygone era -

 

I look fondly at these field plowing paintings - I did some of it when a teenager, I wanted to learn how to turn over and break the soil with a team of horses pulling a plough/plow, and I was lucky enough some of my grand-uncles had horses and used plows, be it with some nostalgia for the bygone times...  

Wiki Commons gallery image

and Alfred Munnings' canvas of Laura Knight painting :

all images are presented here under the Creative Commons licence,

Valete