Born in London, Jonathan Knight was brought up in an artistic atmosphere as his father was a noted book illustrator and his mother a designer and art school teacher. From the age of ten,
Knight experimented in sculpture influenced by the work of Giacometti and Marino Marini.
After graduating with a master’s degree in English from Cambridge, Knight returned to sculpture and
began to specialise in equine sculpture, reflecting a lifelong fascination with horses. Early in his career, he had a one-man show at W H Patterson Fine Art in Mayfair, and received many equine commissions
through both that gallery and the Sladmore Gallery, as well as receiving private commissions to sculpt a
number of life-size horses for international studs and racecourses.By the early nineties however, Knight
began to fight against the aesthetic restrictions of that genre. A considerable metamorphosis developed in
his work. His subject matter was now largely birds and wild animals but treated in a contemporary manner
in which superfluous detail was discarded in favour of a form and line and movement. His work thus joined
a tradition of animalier sculpture that originated in the Art Nouveau movement and found expression in
the work of Rembrandt Bugatti and Francois Pompon amongst others.
Over the ensuing years, Knight’s reputation has grown through frequent exhibitions both in the UK and
Belgium and Holland. He is now seen, through the unique sensibility and purity of his work, as one of
the finest exponents of animalier sculpture working today. His sculptures, to which he personally gives
individual and expressive patinas, are invariably cast in bronze and in highly limited editions.
