Waiting for the Ferry
Daniel Ridgway Knight was famous for his idealized and romanticized paintings of French peasants and rural life. He grew up in a Quaker family, and though he wanted to be an artist, their strict beliefs forbade such a profession. As a youth, he was apprenticed to the family wholesale hardware business, but he secretly studied art at night. Thankfully, his grandfather recognized Knight’s talent and persuaded Knight’s father to enroll his son at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He flourished there in the distinguished company of Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins. Soon thereafter Knight traveled to Rome and Paris for further study. When the Civil War broke out, Knight returned to Philadelphia in 1863 to serve in the Union army. During the war, he sketched battle scenes and created an artistic chronicle of the war. After his military service, Knight returned to France and settled there permanently by 1872 with his wife, a former pupil, and later a son who became a landscape painter.
Adept at natural light effects on the landscape, his art stems from the French Realist tradition founded by Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet, whereby peasants and rural life are treated with dignity. But Knight romanticizes the peasants much more than his predecessors. In Waiting for the Ferry, he painted a group of French villagers and a scruffy dog greeting a red-scarfed young woman in a dilapidated rowboat. The composition is replete with charming details: a young blond boy holds two fish, presumably freshly caught. Knight sedulously differentiated the textures of hair on the curly, wiry fur of the dog and that of the smooth and shiny blonde-headed boy. He hints at their poverty; the pants of the young boy have a large hole-- clearly, he has worn them through! The two standing women bear heavy loads, but one even smiles. The other holds vines or branches tied up blanket. Her parcek is so heavy that she must use two hands. Knight maintained he used French village girls as his models.
Knight was a highly decorated artist, awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor, Paris Exposition Universelle, 1889; Knight of the Royal Order of St. Michael of Bavaria, Munich, 1893; and the Gold medal of honor from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1893.
