Study: A Balloon Site, Coventry (VI) by Dame Laura Knight, watercolour on paper

This compositional study representing a barrage balloon among trees, with female balloon operators below it, is one of several preparatory drawings by Dame Laura Knight for a painting commissioned by the War Office to encourage recruitment of women to RAF Balloon Command - 'A Balloon Site: Coventry' (1942, Imperial War Museums). In 1941, WAAF operators replaced men at RAF Balloon Command.

Knight made this study before she finalised the painting's composition. While she represents Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) operators standing and sitting beneath the balloon, in subsequent drawings and the finished painting she positions them manoeuvring and tethering it. Following the devastating Blitz raids over Coventry in 1940-41, she was briefed to attract 'the right sort' of women to enlist; thus she emphasised their agility and strength in handling the unwieldy balloon. In her introduction to 'War Pictures by British Artists: Women' (1943), she described the balloon anthropomorphically, as seeming to have a life of its own: 'Come fine, come storm, by day or by night, the Balloon must go up or down, be tended as a living thing, a guardian. The occasion may be a mere point's change in the wind: her wings deflate, flap and inflate; unwieldy, she dips her monstrous bulk as the "hands" manoeuvre her like ants with an egg ... to-day the Balloon is storm-bedded; the lashings, a network on its sides, press into the flesh of a colossal silver toad.' Bequest of the artist. Copyright: the artist's estate and Bridgeman Images / RAF Museum.