Biography
Charles Neil Knight (b. London, UK 1865 - d. 1947), son of Elizabeth Mary Baillie and John Burgess Knight, soap manufacturer at the Royal Primrose Soaps Works, was educated at Oxford. He studied at the Académie Julian, Paris. Knight married Anna Newton and they had two sons, John and Charles. They lived in Bath for many years from the mid-1920’s. He was the honorary secretary of the Bath Society of Artists, advised the Victoria Art Gallery on purchases, and was governor of the Bath Academy of Art whose principal, Clifford Ellis (1907-1985) introduced Walter Sickert (1860-1942) to Knight. In 1941 he commissioned Sickert to paint a portrait of his wife, Anna, possibly as a way of alleviating Sickert’s straitened financial circumstances, which the war had made increasingly precarious.