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| | Knight, Daniel Ridgway | (American, 1839-1924) |
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| | Knight was born into a strict Quaker family in Philadephia. Instead of joining the family business, he enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, alongside peers Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, William Sartain, and Everett Shinn. He later traveled to Paris to take classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. While in France, Knight befriended the young Impressionists Alfred Sisley and August Renior. However, his time in Paris was interrupted by the American Civil War and Knight returned to Philadelphia in 1863 to enlist. | | In Philadelphia he exhibited historical paintings, painted portrait paintings, and taught at his studio. He married one of his students, a young girl named Rebecca Webster, in 1871. The two traveled to Paris for their honeymoon, where Knight remained the rest of his life. His art soon exclusively focused on French peasantry and the open air of the fields in which they worked. This theme had already been explored by Jean-Francois Millet, but unlike Millet, Knight depicted peasants engaged leisurely in their activities, free from hard work and exhaustion. | | His delightful renderings gained great commercial success and was awarded the silver medal and Cross of the Legion of Honor, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889, and was made a Knight of the Royal Order of St. Michael of Bavaria, Munich, 1893, and receiving the gold medal of honor from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1893. |
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