Study for ‘Take Off’: Interior of a Stirling bomber and Crew by Dame Laura Knight, charcoal and watercolour on paper

This detailed compositional drawing represents a Bomber Command crew in a Stirling cockpit. It is one of many preparatory works, drawn on large sheets of paper, which Dame Laura Knight made for the painting ‘Take Off’ (1943, Imperial War Museums).

Based at RAF Mildenhall with No. 15 Squadron, Knight, who did not accompany the crew in flight, depicted them as if poised to embark on a raid over Germany. In addition to the crew, whom she posed, Knight made numerous studies of the aircraft interior. For the finished painting, however, which she based on this composition, she emphasised the young airmen, over machinery and operations, to hint at the crew's vulnerability. The Stirling bomber was a challenge to fly, incurring many accidents and losses, especially upon take off. Commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) for the Ministry of Information, the painting may be regarded as a propagandist vision of Bomber Command, conveying a disarmingly personal, than strategic, perspective. This approach may be said to reflect on Knight’s changing attitude to war art commissioning. In the First World War she had declined an invitation to become an Official War Artist owing to the scheme’s propagandist intent. While, instead, the Second World War scheme aimed to develop an ‘artistic record’ of the conflict, which suited the broader aims of artists, Knight was undoubtedly aware of the Air Ministry’s motivations to encourage recruitment and positive publicity for Bomber Command. The commission, however, presented her with an unmissable opportunity as a female war artist whose subjects had until then been narrowly prescribed. Although Knight, who had covered a broad range of themes and genres over her long career, did not define her practice in exclusively gendered terms, the WAAC tasked women war artists with representing mostly ‘women’s work’ and experiences. Few were commissioned to depict servicemen. For Knight, who had made portraits of heroic figures in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, including Daphne Pearson GC, ‘Take Off’ afforded the first opportunity to represent a male air crew at work, in an ambitious ‘subject painting’. Although many single portraits by male artists were commissioned and purchased by the WAAC - including those by Eric Kennington, William Dring and Cuthbert Orde - few of them depicted Bomber- or Fighter Command crews in aircraft, to bring their operations to life. ‘Take Off’ therefore marked a turning point in expanding Knight’s wartime repertoire and in becoming the Second World War’s defining painting of RAF air crew. Immediately after the war, Knight was commissioned to paint the Nuremberg Trials, garnering much publicity as one of the war’s most important artists. Bequest of the artist, 1974. Copyright: the artist’s estate and Bridgeman Images / RAF Museum.