Daniel Ridgway Knight

Daniel Ridgway Knight painted French peasant women and made a comfortable living doing it. He settled at Poissy on the Seine, built a glass walled studio in his garden so he could paint outdoors in controlled conditions, and posed local women in it against real landscape backgrounds.

That method explains the look of the work: plein air light with studio finish. American collectors bought heavily, and the pictures sold consistently in a way Millet’s harder peasant subjects never did in his lifetime.

The criticism writes itself. These are agricultural workers who never look tired, resting by riverbanks with flowers. Knight was not trying for social comment. What he was after, and got, was daylight on cotton and skin, handled with real skill.