Storms and tempests have always attracted artists with their visions of romanticism and apocalypse. Looking out of my window this wet stormy morning has inspired me to mark the occasion. So my February Painting of the Month is the award winning oil painting by Winifred Knights (1899-1947) entitled The Deluge.

The Deluge with its limited palette, angular construction and Vorticist ideas is very powerful. Her initial designs were biblical with the ark being the centrepiece but we see it develop with very contemporary thoughts. The focus is on the people escaping the flood but not rescued by Noah. The sharp angles are the concrete buildings and we see the windowless ark disappearing in the background. To quote the Tate ‘the ark suggests the modern concrete buildings, and the figures are those of present-day men and women. Critics declare the painter a genius’. This comes from the Daily Graphic of February 1921.

The Deluge was exhibited at the Royal Academy with other competition entries. The work carries more contemporary power with the knowledge that the men and women escaping the cascading waters, running up the hill are the artist, herself, and others she knew. Knights is the women in the foreground while her mother is carrying her baby. The artist, Arnold Mason is scrambling away from the flooding waters.

Knights’s painting won the 1920 Prix de Rome Scholarship for Decorative Painting, for which she received a three year travelling award in Italy. Her inspiration was the Renaissance medieval religious paintings which she saw in Italy on her scholarship tour and continued painting in this style between the wars. Alongside Stanley Spencer she became part of a group of artists that revived the religious genre with a very English Twentieth Century style.