High-Water Boots
Reflections on Louis Aston Knight
From Vol 2 Issue 5 - September, 2000

I spent my happy childhood on a backcountry homestead on the shore of a large and restless lake, but some of the water that most impressed me is caught within the frames of some paintings by my Great Uncle Louis.

Several of his works, large and small, hung on the walls of our log home on Adams Lake and sometimes the oil lamps and flickering fire on a long winter night would seem to bring them to life. They are with me still.

Louis Aston Knight, who died at the age of 74 in New York In 1948, was considered one of the best American landscape painters of his time, but to his pals he was the running-water painter or The Man in High-Water Boots. Capturing the mood, In watercolors, of swift-flowing rivers and streams was one of his specialties, and he often stood out in the current to do it.

Uncle Louis was broad and powerful, reputedly able to lift a man of medium size off the floor, at arms' length. He liked his food and his booze, played mild practical jokes, traveled the world, painted hundreds of pictures, and laughed a lot.

He was one of the central characters in a 1912 book called The Arm-Chair at the Inn, by American novelist F. Hopkinson Smith. The setting was the ancient Inn of William the Conqueror in the Normandy village of Dives-sur-Mer, and I was enthralled by the atmospheric accounts of the place. According to Smith, the inn has hosted such luminaries as Louis XI, Henry IV, Moliere, Dumas, George Sand and many painters and sculptors.

My wife, Dorothy, and I visited the village some years ago. The big, rambling inn is no longer taking in travelers, but - and this seems wonderfully appropriate - has been converted into a residence and workshop for struggling young artists from many parts of France. I was able to see some of the rooms and the gardens described in the book, and went away satisfied.

Uncle Louis (he signed his paintings as Aston Knight) was born in Paris, the son of expatriate American Daniel Ridgway Knight, who was a pupil of Meissonier and renowned for portraying the lives of the French peasants. Louis Aston Knight was educated in England and then studied art under his father and also under Jules Lefebvre and Tony Robert-Fleury.

He was an impressionist, avoiding painstaking detail yet capturing the feel and essence of the landscape, and he had little patience with the modernists. Louis summed up much of their stuff (probably including that of the great Picasso) in one word: "Rot!"

"Painting is painting, my boy," he once told an interviewer. "You can't make a monkey of art. Of course the day of meticulous detail is done with, and that's a good thing. But we who call ourselves honest painters really try to capture nature in some one of her authentic moods. We don't try to make the grand old girl look like a rock pile or a problem in algebra." Take that, Pablo. Sorry, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Paul Klee - it's all Rot.

He lived most of his life in Normandy, for many years at an old manor house in the village of Beaumont-le-Roger, where he built his daughter an elaborate playhouse that later appeared in many paintings. But he also traveled and painted in the U.S., Canada, Holland, Italy, Haiti and Jamaica. His works received medals at Paris, Rheims, Cherbourg, Geneva, Lyon and Nantes. France showered him with honors, including Commander of the Legion of Honor, and other awards came from the governments of Morocco and Haiti.

And in our small house, as well as in homes and museums in many parts of the world, his watercolor streams still sparkle and flow. And whenever I put on hip waders and lean against a current to try to raise a trout, I think of my late Uncle Louis when he stood in those cold French rivers trying to capture some of Mother Nature's moods.

Tony Eberts, now retired, is an environmental columnist whose 40 years with The Vancouver Province newspaper won him much esteem and respect. abeberts@telus.net