An Artist’s Life

20
SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS
Mendham 1878 – 1959 Dedham
Before the races, Derby Day
Signed lower right: A.J. Munnings
Canvas: 28 × 35 ½ in / 71.1 × 90.2 cm
Painted circa 1920
Provenance:
Private collection, UK
St James’s Galleries Ltd (John and Richard Green), 75 Jermyn Street,
London;
by whom sold on 27 th March 1961 to Mrs Bernard Lyons, Wigton House,
near Leeds
Richard Green, London, 2008
Private collection, UK
Literature:
Lionel Lindsay, AJ Munnings RA: Pictures of Horses and English Life,
London 1939, p.109, no.55 (‘Epsom Week’)
On loan from a private collection, UK
Before the races, Derby Day stands with the slightly larger Arrival at
Epsom Downs, Gypsy life and Epsom Downs, City and Suburban Day, 1919
(Tate Britain, London) 1 as a celebration of one of the most important
events in the gypsy calendar, the early June race meeting inaugurated
in 1780 by the raffish Lord Derby, who gave his name to one of the
classic races of the Turf. They were essential participants in the great
gathering which attracted everyone from Dukes downwards, portrayed
in Frith’s panoramic Derby Day, 1856 and in Laura Knight’s sensitive
gypsy portraits of the 1930s. Although Munnings made his paintings
and studies mostly in the gypsy camp at Binstead, rather than in the
brouhaha of Epsom Week itself, Before the races captures the radiant light
of the Surrey downs, the gathering before a great set piece of English
theatre, and the indomitable figures of the gypsy race.
The spacious, monumental composition of Before the races, Derby Day and
its joyous palette is characteristics of Munnings’s gypsy subjects of the
1920s. The green of the caravan is picked up in the shawl of the adjacent
gypsy woman, while a band of yellows ripples across the canvas, from the
gold on the caravan, to the orange of the fringed shawl, the buttercup
yellow of the young woman’s scarf, to the wheat-coloured fur of the
left-hand lurcher. Munnings makes bold juxtapositions of colour with
a stylish insouciance typical of the gypsies themselves. The Australian
art critic Sir Lionel Lindsay, who met gypsies with Munnings on Derby
Day, writes of their ‘Oriental love of colour’, adding ‘I have never seen
the gitana make a mistake in arranging colours. No matter how bright
and gay the hues, she possesses an unerring sense of harmony and
juxtaposition that never betrays her’ 2 .
Before the races, Derby Day conveys the sinuous grace of these aristocrats
of the gypsy world, posed as if in a classical frieze set against the huge
sky of Epsom Downs. To avoid friction, Munnings had early learned
that it was ‘better to paint amongst a certain set of families who, in some
way or other, were related’ 3 and who enjoyed the kudos – not to mention
the gold sovereigns – to be derived from ‘Mr Money’. The gypsy in the
magnificent black coster hat to the right of Before the races is Mrs Mark
Stevens, who drives the cart in Arrival at Epsom Downs for Derby Week
(Birmingham City Art Gallery) 4 , completed in Hampshire in 1920.
She also appears in Gypsy life, again painted on the 1920 Hampshire
expedition and sold to Aberdeen Art Gallery that year for £850 5 . ‘What a
blessing the gypsies did not know of these figures, or I should have been
skinned alive!’ 6 , Munnings laughed.
1 See An English Idyll, p.34, fig. 20.
2 AJ Munnings, RA: Pictures of Horses and English Life, London and New York 1927, p.24.
3 An Artist's Life, p.289.
4 See An English Idyll, p.34, fig. 21.
5 See An English Idyll, p.96, no.46, illus. in colour.
6 Sir Alfred Munnings, The Second Burst, London 1951, p.282.