Alfred Munnings was tall, handsome, a daring horseman, the life and soul of the party, a writer of verse. Underneath it all he was a sensitive soul and a draughtsman and painter of dazzling ability.
He was born in Mendham, Suffolk in 1878, the son of a miller, like his great East Anglian inspiration, John Constable. Early works like The Norwich fair, 1907, reflect Edwardian country life, a gentle world which was soon to disappear in the mud of Flanders. Horses played a crucial part in this society; Munnings’s fascination with them would endure throughout his career.
Munnings painted his first racehorse portrait in 1919. The Sport of Kings would bring him fame and fortune. He observed horses Going to the Start and after a race, capturing with bravura brushwork sunlight on glossy coats and the jewel-like dazzle of the jockeys’ silks.
After the First World War, Munnings bought Castle House at Dedham in Essex. The following year he married Violet McBride, a stylish equestrienne. Chestnuts in bloom at Castle House reveals the sensitivity of his landscape painting, observing nature with simplicity and directness. Portraying landscape became an escape valve from the stress of painting high-society equestrian portraits.
In 1924 Munnings sailed to America to be a judge for the International Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. He was plunged into ‘gloriously mad days’ among the Prohibition-era East Coast élite. Mrs Prince was the wife of a stockbroker and industrialist. Munnings’s free, evocative watercolour technique, with rapid, wet washes and scratched-out highlights, places the elegant rider in a dappled New England wood.
Munnings spent the Second World War at Withypool in Somerset. The panoramic sweep of Exmoor, with its purple heather and scudding clouds, fired his imagination in a different way from the gentle landscape of East Anglia. He wrote lyrically of ‘the long, dark, calm, curving line of the hill’, with the sky an ‘intense line of light’.
In 1944 Munnings was elected President of the Royal Academy and awarded a Knighthood the following year, the pinnacle of his career. His love of all things equestrian had drawn him into the orbit of the Royal Family, for whom he undertook several commissions. This painting is a study of the rococo Gold State Coach, part of a campaign to paint Edward VII’s Coronation Procession. Edward’s Abdication in December 1936 meant that the commission was never completed.
Richard Green has been championing Sir Alfred Munnings for more than six decades, meeting him as a teenager in the 1950s when his father James Green held an exhibition of Munnings’s work. Our current selection of paintings for sale shows the many facets of his career. Over those years, Richard Green Gallery has sold over 700 paintings by this exuberant chronicler of British life and landscape.
2 окт 2024
