Louis Aston Knight at Ashridge

Louis Aston Knight (1873–1948) was born in Paris, the son of the American painter Daniel Ridgway Knight. Trained at the Salon under Tony Robert-Fleury and Jules Lefebvre, he won gold at the Paris Salon in 1905 and 1906 and was made Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor in 1924. He painted the country estates and riverbanks of the American Northeast in the motif later called riverbank and flowers — still water, late light, houses seen at a distance.

He often worked from the water itself — waders, easel, palette — when the reflection was the subject. President Warren G. Harding purchased his painting The Afterglow for the White House in 1922. By the mid-1920s Knight could choose his commissions, and preferred estates whose owners had made something of the land.

The McLean Commission

The McLean mansion at South Kortright was finished before the summer of 1915 — brick, granite fireplaces, a copper roof still bright from the family's own trade. Knight came that same summer, forty-two and recently returned from France. He painted at least two canvases while here.

The first, Riverside Farm — South Kortright, N.Y., looks north-northwest across the lake James McLean had built toward the mansion on its rise — willow at the right, meadow and wildflowers in the foreground, hills beyond the West Branch valley. The copper roof reads as a darker mass in the cloud light; in 1915 it was still the color of a freshly minted penny. The painting is signed Aston Knight lower right. It is now in private hands; its image is public domain — and, to our knowledge, the earliest surviving picture of Ashridge.

A second canvas, a view of the West Branch at South Kortright, was exhibited in New York in 1918. We have not been able to trace it. James McLean called the river-meadow acreage Riverside Farm; by the 1930s his daughter Alice had extended the name Ashridge to the whole estate. We hold both in the record.

What we are still looking for

The 1918 river painting may survive in a private collection under another title — or it may not survive at all. Many country-house paintings of the period have not. If you hold materials from Knight's 1915 visit, or know where the river canvas is, we would like to hear from you.

Knight died in Paris in 1948. Most of the estates he painted in America have been demolished or altered beyond recognition. Ashridge is one of the few that remains.