Laura Knight at the National Portrait Gallery

In spite of being footsore after viewing the three National Gallery exhibitions (plus a quick look at the 1750-1850 British painting galleries with reference to the Tate Britain rehang, of which more later), I took the opportunity to nip round the corner to the National Portrait Gallery to see the

Laura Knight exhibition.

I must admit Laura Knight is not a painter I paid much attention to - a resolutely figurative painter whose work, it seemed to me, did not show much originality and sometimes seemed closer to illustration than painting (no disrespect to illustrators). I won't say this show won me over completely, but it certainly made me see her in a new light. I was surprised to find the variety of styles she used in the course of her long career, from thickly applied impasto to super smooth to almost photographic detail. It wasn't clear if this was related to the subjects she painted at different times in her life or a desire to refresh her technique: certainly her Second World paintings were deliberately painted to be suitable for reproduction for propaganda purposes.

She was drawn to ordinary working people and marginalised groups, probably because of her impoverished background (both her parents had died by the time she was 18). I found she often spent months with her subjects, which explains why her paintings do not look like illustrations after all. When she paints dancers, circus people, gypsies, or factory workers she is clearly painting people she knew, not examples of a type. She was popular with Americans, who were probably surprised at the depictions of black nurses and child patients she did at the seggregated Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after the war when her husband was undertaking a portrait commission. Such accurate, straightforward, non-cartoonish portraits of black people were rare in America then, and they stand out in a British context too. The same working method works extremely well in her war artist work, where her paintings of genuine male and female war heroes totally avoid the "heroic", which only emphasises their heroism.

The exhibition makes much of Knight's position as a role model for working women in the 1920s and 30s, and that she was the first women to become a full Royal Acedemician since the eighteenth-century. The fact that she was not a modernist must have made it easier for her contemporaries to see her in this light - someone like us, not of the intellectual elite, whose indefaticable work ethic seemed to show effort would be rewarded. Nevertheless, if Laura Knight was not a modernist, she did not reject modernity, and she well deserves this retrospective.

Incidentally, one of the portaits, called Rose and Gold, is of Dolly Henry, the model who was murdered by John Currie, whose group portrait is in the current Crisis of Brilliance show at Dulwich. The label says she was killed shortly after the portrait was painted. Another connection is that I came across a 1937 self-portait by David Bomberg on my way out, done in a "freely expressive style" as the label has it, quite different from his early vorticist work.