An Artist’s Life

1
SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS
Mendham 1878 – 1959 Dedham
A Suffolk horse fair, Lavenham
Signed and dated lower left: A.J. Munnings / 1901
Oil on canvas: 50 × 80 in / 127 × 203.2 cm
Exhibited:
London, Royal Academy, 1901, no.902
Norwich Castle Museum, Munnings: Pictures from the Sir Alfred
Munnings Art Museum, 1977, no.10, pl.1
London, Sotheby’s, An English Idyll: a Loan Exhibition of Works by Sir
Alfred Munnings, 2001, pp.48–49, illus. in colour
Literature:
Stanley Booth, Sir Alfred Munnings 1878–1959, London 1978, pp.120–121,
illus. in colour; paperback, 1986, pl.32
Jean Goodman, The Life of Alfred Munnings 1878–1959, 1988, revd. edn.
2000, pl.12
On loan from The Munnings Collection,
The Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum
This 50 × 80 in canvas, ‘skied in the last room’ at the Royal Academy of
1901, gives the measure of the twenty-two-year-old Munnings’s ambition.
It shows him adapting the rural subjects of Jules Bastien-Lepage, Henry
La Thangue and George Clausen to a motif dear to his heart: the life
of working horses. Munnings was introduced to the Lavenham Horse
Fair, famous for the buying and selling of heavy draught horses, by the
gypsy fairground-man Nobby Gray. The handsome, beribboned Suffolk
Punches attracted dealers from London in search of dray horses, as well
as local farmers seeking teams for the plough. ‘We went from inn-yard
to inn-yard, where straw lay strewn on the ground, and those well-fed,
clean-shaven, purple-faced men already were seeing horses trotted up and
down in the yards, in the main street, in the lesser streets, on a green and
up near the great church with its tall tower’ 1 .
Munnings enlarged the composition from a watercolour, which gave him
some trouble in getting the tone of the grass and balancing the transition
from the foreground drama to the receding high street in such a large
oil painting. Lavenham owes its prosperity to the medieval wool trade
and is famous for the picturesque cluster of fifteenth century houses
which ascend the street to the church of St Peter and St Paul. Munnings
orchestrates a panorama of foreground activity, the patient horses on the
left-hand side contrasting with the horse dealer trotting out of the picture
on the right with a herd of multicoloured beasts. Introducing this energy
of animals in movement, Munnings was drawing on the inspiration of
paintings such as Lady Elizabeth Butler’s Scotland for ever! and the work
of Lucy Kemp-Welch. He noted that the vigorously foreshortened roan,
almost bursting out of the picture plane, was ‘my worst hindrance’ 2 . The
splendid chestnut Suffolk Punch which dominates the painting appears in
a similar pose in another work of 1901, The plough in early spring (private
collection) 3 .
1 Sir Alfred Munnings, An Artist’s Life, London 1950, p.139.
2 Ibid. p.139.
3 Manchester, The Athenaeum Gallery, Alfred Munnings 1878–1959, 1986–7, no.6, illus.
in colour p.25.