Laura Knight was one of the best-known British artists of her day: elected Assoc. member of the Royal Academy (1927), she was the first woman artist to become a Dame (1929), first Hon. President of the Society of Women Artists (1932), and in 1936, became the first female full Royal Academician (1936). Celebrated for her figurative paintings, drawings and etchings, executed with great technical skill, meticulous realism and extraordinary attention to detail, particularly her paintings of ballet and circus folk and her portraiture, she was unafraid to stake her claim as a woman artist in a male-dominated field. An Official War Artist during the Second World War, she was the only woman painter commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to document the Nuremberg Trials in 1946.