Jonathan Knight

It has been 10 years now since I first met Jonathan Knight at Cheltenham Racecourse. His sculpture, mainly horses at that period, made an important impact on me and few months later we opened our first one-man exhibition in Belgium, with success. There was not only an empathy between me and his sculptures. Soon I discovered the person behind the artist and our business relation turned into a close friendship.

Jonathan grew up in London where he was born in 1954. He inherited many of his artistic leanings from his father, a graphic illustrator specialising in sporting art.
He believes his first sculpture was of a hippopotamus made in papier-maché at the age of ten.
After having survived the academic pressures of school and university life, his precocious early talent bursted into flame in his mid twenties through a lifelong passion for horses.
With his first one-man exhibition in London in 1987 dedicated to "The Racehorse" came along an everincreasing demand for his studio bronzes form all over the world. At the same time he was also engaged on several public commissions.
His sculpture of "Dawn Run" at Cheltenham Racecourse and of "Music Boy" at Cheveley Park Stud in Newmarket are perfect examples of the artist's potential in that field.

Life lived in the country and an appreciation of nature were perhaps the causes of a shift in the focus of Jonathan's work towards the study of animals and birds. His technical skills and expressive powers in capturing them in motion are admired world-wide.
In a few years he completely changed his way of working, his way of looking at his subject and his way of treating it.
It was the philosophy of the Art Deco movement in the twenties and artists such as Pompon, Rembrandt Bugatti or Albéric Collin that inspired him in this new challenge.

A very personal view, a contemporary approach and an amazing technical skill makes Jonathan Knight one of the leading artists in the contemporary animalier scene.