Daniel Ridgway Knight, Young Girl Mending
Daniel Ridgway Knight, Young Girl Mending, signed lower right Ridgway Knight, Paris, (France), ca. 1890, oil on canvas, 36" x 35". Knight was among the first wave of American artists who travelled to France to study expressionism with Monet at his home in Giverny. Knight began his artistic studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1861, continuing in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and in Rome at the Accademia di San Luca.
He served briefly in the Union Army during the Civil War returning to Paris in 1872, where in the countryside he found peasant models and the landscape settings for his genre paintings.Knight pursued a naturalist and naturalism in the manner of Jules Bastien-Lepage.