The Best Guide for the Sudbury Area

Reviving Alfred Munnings

My Horse is My Friend: The Artist’s Wife and Issac (c1922)
Owned by Pebble Hill Plantation
Copyright Munnings Collection

National Sporting Museum And Library

Through Sept. 15

Middleburg, Va.

Munnings never was a slavish follower of any particular idiom and it is difficult to trace a linear development in his work as he continually adapted his style to his subjects. He was a painter’s painter, not given to theorizing, but to the production of thousands of paintings during a lifetime devoted to art.

At the outbreak of World War I, he repeatedly volunteered for service, but was rejected because of his blind eye. Eventually, he was posted to a Canadian Cavalry Brigade as a war artist in France. There, close to the German front in 1918, he painted in a single day an equestrian portrait of the unit’s commander, Maj. Gen. Jack Seely, astride his charger, Warrior. It is one of the highlights of the exhibition. Dashed down in just browns and greys, it conveys not only the grim determination of horse and rider but also the cold bleakness of the shell-mutilated landscape of the Western front.

This was an early example of a type which would later make Munnings a fortune and, unfortunately, overshadow the wide variety of other subjects he painted: the equestrian portrait of the fox hunter and mount in repose or in the hunting field, commissioned by the aristocracy of England and numerous wannabes. There are a number of such pictures in the exhibition, some action filled, like “Whipper-In on the Cornish Cliff” (c. 1913), with its stunning view of cliff, sea and surf, and others more formal, like the elegant “Mr. Paul Mellon on ‘Dublin’” (1933). But one feels, as Munnings did, that the formal constraints of the latter do not display the full range of his talent. For that we must turn to the numerous other paintings here, especially those of hunting and horse racing, which gleam with action, color and excitement.

But the exhibition’s most memorable painting of horse and rider is the 1922 portrait of his second wife, Violet McBride. (Almost as eccentric as her husband, Violet published a diary of her Pekingese, Black Night, and had him stuffed after he died.) The painting shows a slightly smiling Violet standing, dressed in an elegant black riding habit, hand on hip, holding the reins of her grey mount. The originality of her dismounted pose, and the asymmetrical arrangement of horse and rider are striking, as is the picture’s setting—only faintly suggested by the broad, abstract bands of browns and green. By contrast, the horse’s coat is a wonder of closely observed light, shade and texture set down in a flurry of fluid, heavily laden brush strokes.

An exhibition in the museum’s library, “Sir Alfred J. Munnings in Print: Unpublished Letters and Drawings,” accompanies the paintings show, and “Summer in February,” a new film about the artist’s tragic first marriage starring “Downton Abbey” heartthrob Dan Stevens, was just released in the U.K. A major monograph by Munnings expert Lorian Peralta-Ramos will appear next year. And Tate Britain has included Munnings’s “Their Majesties’ Return From Ascot” (1925) in its newly reopened reinstallation of its permanent collection, restoring it to public view for the first time in nearly 25 years. Will all this be enough to rehabilitate Munnings? Let’s hope so.

Bruce Cole is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

For the whole article see http://www.eppc.org/publications/reviving-alfred-munnings/

For the Munnings Collection click HERE

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