Collection: Daniel Ridgeway Knight - Classic Art

This is part of our "Classic" collections -  art created prior to the Modern Art era.  This artist is one of our favorites. Daniel Ridgway Knight was an American Realist who focused on pastoral genre scenes. The majority of his compositions comprised peasant women picking wildflowers against the backdrop of a river or lake.  Born in 1839, Daniel Ridgway Knight was raised in the borough of Chambersburg and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. During this time that he began exhibiting his compositions publicly.  He moved to Paris in 1861 to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.

Knight moved back to the United States in 1863 during Civil War and served in the Union Army. The time he spent off the battlefield was often dedicated to sketching, and recording details of the war in genre scenes as well as portraits of fellow soldiers. In the years following the war, he established the Philadelphia Sketch Club, showcasing much of the work pertaining to that period in addition to opera scenes and mythological compositions. In 1871, he married Rebecca Morris Webster, one of his former students, and began accepting commissions for portraits in order to earn enough money to move back to France. . . . Read Less