Exhibition Catalog | Jacob Lawrence

CAT. 10
Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence
(U.S.A., b. Barbados, 1913–2005)
Augusta Savage
1967
Oil on canvas
24 × 18 in.
2013.91
This powerful work exhibits signs of
the experimental approach that Knight
Lawrence developed while studying painting at The
New School in New York in the mid-1960s. The brushstrokes
are vigorous and expressive, and she explores
the work’s materiality by exposing the white ground
that coats the canvas. This portrait was completed five
years after the death of its subject, sculptor Augusta
Savage, whom Knight Lawrence would later describe
as having been “a second mother to me,” adding,
“her studio was a second home.”¹⁴ Before she met
Savage, Knight Lawrence had taken painting classes
for two years at Howard University with the Bostonborn
artist Lois Mailou Jones. In 1933 financial need
obliged Knight Lawrence to rejoin her family in
Harlem. She worked under Savage for the next four
years, and continued to paint after she married Jacob
Lawrence in 1941.
14. Barbara Earl Thomas,
“Never Late for Heaven,” in
Never Late for Heaven: The
Art of Gwen Knight (Seattle:
University of Washington
Press, 2003), 23.
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