SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS
Mendham 1878 - 1959 Dedham
Ref: CD 188
Withypool Hill, looking south
Signed lower right: A.J. Munnings
Oil on panel: 18 x 24 in / 45.7 x 61 cm
Frame size: 23 ¼ x 29 ½ in / 59.1 x 74.9 cm
In an English style gilded hollow frame
Painted in the 1940s
Provenance:
Frost & Reed, London
HJ Dunsmuir Esq., Martnaham Lodge, Martnaham by Ayr, Scotland, by 1956 Ian MacNicol, Glasgow; private collection, UK, acquired from the above in 1968 Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, Diploma Gallery, Sir Alfred Munnings, 1956, no.129, as Withypool Hill (lent by HJ Dunsmuir Esq.) Literature: Sir Alfred Munnings, The Finish: The Autobiography of Sir Alfred Munnings K.C.V.O., P.P.R.A., vol. III, Bungay 1952, illus. opposite p.80
Alfred Munnings’s second wife, the brilliant equestrienne Violet McBride, owned a hunting box at Withypool in Somerset from the 1920s. For Munnings, increasingly in demand as a Society equestrian portraitist and racing painter, visits to the West Country were a blessed escape, where he could indulge his delight in landscape painting. Munnings spent much of the Second World War at Withypool after his main home, Castle House at Dedham in Essex, was requisitioned by the Army. The privations of wartime were ameliorated by the leisure to capture the moods of Exmoor, often riding up to a chosen spot and painting on panel en plein air.
The panoramic format of this work emphasises the rolling, open terrain. Farms are nestled in the valleys, snug between hedgerows and trees which throw long, blue-green shadows. Sheep, upon which the Exmoor economy heavily depended, dot the foreground. The cultivated fields, with distant haycocks in neat rows, gradually give way to the purple, open moorland, rising up to meet a cloudscape of fitful light and dark. Munnings was endlessly fascinated by this changing scene, writing in the third volume of his autobiography, The Finish (1952): ‘I sat down…and just listened to the sound of water and songs of skylarks, and watched, with pleasure beyond words, those beautiful moving cloud-shadows passing over the hill, down the combe. Sometimes the hillside and its top were paler than the sky, and sometimes darker; but there were always the rare quality of the blue sky, and the pale, dove-coloured clouds’[1].
SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS, PRA, RWS
Mendham 1878 - 1959 Dedham
Born in Mendham, Suffolk, Alfred Munnings was the son of a miller. He was apprenticed to a firm of lithographers from 1893 to 1898 and studied at the Norwich School of Art and in Paris. There he was impressed with plein-air naturalism; this, together with his introduction to the racecourse in 1899, influenced the themes for which he became famous.
While in Mendham, Munnings painted many scenes of country life, particularly horse fairs. He went to Cornwall in 1911, and for many years was an important addition to the Newlyn School of artists. When the First World War broke out, Munnings enlisted, despite having the use of only one eye owing to an accident in 1899. He became an army horse trainer near Reading and later went to France as an official war artist, attached to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade.
The year 1919 was a major turning-point in all aspects of Munnings’s life; he painted his first racehorse, Pothlyn, the winner of the Grand National, and became an Associate of the Royal Academy. He met Violet McBride, whom he was to marry, and bought Castle House, Dedham, where the Munnings Memorial Trust maintains a permanent exhibition of his pictures. Munnings’s prolific career, spanning over sixty years, brought him honour, with election to the Presidency of the Royal Academy in 1944, a Knighthood in 1945, and a personal award from the Sovereign in 1947, when he was created Knight of the Royal Victorian Order.
[1] Page 67.
