Grandfather's Portrait, from "Illustrated London News"

In a rustic kitchen a farmer examines a portrait that his young son has drawn on a slate as the rest of the family look on admiringly. Knight's paintings of rural families and boys at play relied upon genre types developed a few decades before by David Wilkie and William Mulready. Knight here echoes a theme found in the biographies of famous artists--Vasari, for example, recorded how Giotto, when a shepherd boy, drew pictures of his flock on rocks that attracted the attention of the Florentine painter Cimabue, who then took the youth on as an apprentice. This print, executed by the leading engraver Thomas, was published one year before Knight’s early death at the age of forty, and the related oil painting is at the Tunbridge Wells Museum and Gallery.

Credit: Gift of Donato Esposito, 2015