Pencil, 22 by 22 cm

Provenance: acquired directly by the previous owner from Monnington's second wife, Evelyn Monnington in c.1985

Monnington married his fellow painter and Rome Scholar Winifred Knights in 1924. He painted and drew her on numerous occasions and she is also seen as a sitter in some of the artist’s allegorical and subject paintings. Knights’s premature death in 1947 was partly responsible for her descent into obscurity. Retrospectives of Knights in the early 1990s and at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2016 have since helped to establish her as one of the great underrated talents of her age.