Arthur Harold DeWitt Knott (b. Toronto, Canada 1883 – d. San Luis Obispo County 1977) The son of a stockbroker, A. Harold Knott immigrated with his family to Vermont in 1885. He began his art studies at Pratt Institute in 1903, with further training at the Art Students League in New York City. In 1919 he traveled to the Southwest to explore and paint on Indian reservations. After two years of living in desert lands, he established his home studio in Carmel where he spent hours studying waves in an attempt “to catch a permanent impression of a huge wave breaking over the rocky shoreline.” Supporting himself as a carpenter and odd-jobber so he would be free to paint without needing to sell his artworks, he joined Carmel’s Arts & Crafts Club. Said Pine Cone critic Eunice T. Gray in 1925, Knott’s early canvases “possess the vitality that compels attention, filled with a freshness and originality that give new beauty to old scenes along our Carmel shore, opening our eyes to the beauty around us.” A 1927 interview with Pine Cone writer Alice de Nair led her to write: “Artist A. Harold Knott is a practical idealist, a lord of the palette, a servant of the sea, and a lover of all things beautiful, be it a tree, an ocean, cave or song. There are few things that pass unobserved before his keen vision. He works through the objective into the subjective realm. He is a master of light and shade. He does not need a canvas of great dimensions on which to paint the immensities of his scene. He can put them into the smallest space with such mastery that, in looking upon them, you feel that you are viewing a tremendous painting through a diminishing lens. Pretense is as lacking in his paintings as in his personality. His honesty of heart looks out at you from the simple grandeur of his work.” Oils were Knott’s specialty, though he also created watercolors. He believed that it was critical to capture atmospheric effects and luminosity in person. Thus he always began his paintings by sketching and blocking in plein air, though he often completed them in his studio. Knott’s longest professional relationship in Monterey was with the Carmel Art Association, which he juried into in its founding year, 1927. The following year he married Rachael Dunlap of Monterey. Falling in love with San Luis Obispo County when they honeymooned there in Morro Bay, they decided to move there in 1930 but kept his studio in Carmel Woods. This allowed him to return to paint and to exhibit at CAA between 1938 to 1945. During his long career, he also showed in Laguna Beach, San Francisco, Oakland, Pasadena, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Palo Alto, Salt Lake City, and Sacramento, and with the California Art Club and the 105th Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York City. His painting from CAA’s 95 Years exhibition, portraying the Santa Lucia Hills reaching down to the sea, could easily be the very oil described by Antony Anderson of the Los Angeles Times in 1925: "Knott’s paintings present a herculean vigor in paint, a masculine attack that knocks the spots out of everything around it on the walls. No pretty sentiment here. He wrestles long and hard with big brushes, charged thick with paint and emerges from the fray calm and triumphant.” Another review from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1930 expresses these insights even more vividly: “With simplicity and sincerity, Knott interprets California convincingly through a very direct quality of the handling of brushstrokes and the use of strong, clear colors. Knott has absorbed the fundamentals of landscape painting. They form the backbone of his compositions. One feels the structural solidity of mountains, the under-earth rooting of trees, the liquid spray of the sea as it dashed against the rocks. His subject matter has been drawn from Carmel, Morro Bay, and Laguna Beach, conveying lyrical, evanescent light and shadows in canvases of unusual strength.”