“In the Sun, Newlyn was made around 1909, and is a distillation of a hot, carefree Edwardian summer… The Knights had taken lodgings in the village of Paul with the cheerful, eccentric Mrs Beer, who owned the Penzer House guest house; from their rooms ‘the whole stretch of the bay could be seen and grey Penzance transformed by the changing effects of light into a pearly city, the line of hills beyond the coast, the sweep of the Lizard Arm and, at night, the wink of the lighthouse’ (Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint, 1936, p. 165).

This painting is a fruit of Knight’s seminal years in Newlyn, when, as she wrote in her autobiography, ‘an ebullient vitality made me want to paint the whole world and say how glorious it was to be young and strong and able to splash with paint on canvas any old thing one saw, without stint of materials or oneself, the result of a year or two of vigour and enjoyment’ (Oil Paint and Grease Paint, p. 165).”

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