Mary and Her Mother on a seat was painted in pastels during the artist and his family’s staying with architect friend Edgar Wood at his home in Monte Calvario, Porto Maurizio. Edgar Wood was an architect from Manchester who moved to a converted monastery before designing and building a new home nearby at Monte Calvario. Knighton-Hammond may well have known Wood from Manchester and during the late 1920s spent a good deal of time travelling from his home in Cap Martin to visit him. The ornate seat on which the artist’s wife Emmeline (second wife) is sitting with her daughter Mary was designed by Edgar Wood. This is one of a number of pictures of wife and daughter sitting on the seat. Wood was a very good exponent of the art of pastel painting and may well have introduced it to Knighton-Hammond. Here the artist has used the colour of the paper as well as the colours of the pastels to create the composition. If pastel painting was new to Knighton-Hammond he was an immediate success in the art.