Sir Alfred Munnings Part Four

4/7/2026 2:43:11 PM
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SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS

PART FOUR

Munnings returned to London in the summer of 1918, and in January of 1919, the Canadian War Memorial's Exhibition was held at the Royal Academy of Arts. The Canadian government had purchased 350 paintings created by nearly 70 British and Canadian artists -- 45 of them by Munnings. Great interest was given to his large canvas, the Charge of Flowerdew's Squadron, and his work was well received by both the public and critics. Encouraged by how celebrated they were, he later did copies of some of the most popular ones, which were subsequently purchased by James Putnam with Farringham House in Devon. At the close of the London exhibit, the paintings went back to Canada as part of the permanent Beaverbrook Art Collection.

Fittingly, 100-years later Munnings' war paintings were loaned by the Canadian War Museum and went on display again in London at the National Army Museum, from November 2018 through March 2019, and from there traveled on to the Munnings Museum in Dedham for an exhibit before returning to the Beaverbrook Collection at the War Museums in downtown Ottawa, Canada.

The year 1919 brought more good tidings -- not really thinking anything would come of it, he had agreed to allow Richard Jack, a full-member of the Royal Academy, to put forth his name on a vote for associate membership. His election, largely based on the war paintings, was truly a surprise to him and marked a distinct moment of change in his life and career.

In those early years after returning from France he produced a number of paintings that were in the Academy Summer Exhibitions.....

Tagg's Island 1919

On the Downs 1920

Collection: Yale Center for British Art

Gypsy Life 1920

During his stay with his parents in 1911, he was encouraged by Edwin Whitney-Smith, his sculptor friend from St. John's Wood, London, to try his hand with clay. Whitney-Smith was there sculpting a bust of Munnings' father, John, as well as small statuettes of Old Gray and his wife, Charlotte. Edwin made a stand and armature for Munnings and the result was a pleasing likeness of the pony Augereau

Whitney-Smith's bust of John Munnings

In 1919, upon seeing Munnings' first attempt, his friend the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens asked him to create a memorial sculpture of the young cavalry officer Lieutenant Edward Horner, who had been killed in the war. Horner's parents commissioned the work to be placed in their chapel at St. Andrew's church in Mell, Somerset. Lutyen created the plinth for the sculpture and a local blacksmith formed the armature for the full-size version. Munnings brought his horse Patrick into the studio daily to serve as a model, and despite never having done anything of that scope before (the horse was the size of a deer), the result was a striking depiction. He originally had horse and rider's heads bowed, but Edward's mother requested they be changed to look ahead toward the horizon. The memorial was moved from the Horner family chapel in 2007 and is now in the north aisle of the church.

Photo copyright Michael Garlick CC BY-SA 2.0

The bronzed plaster

Details

Later, that sculpture led to a commission in 1935 from Sir Harold Wernher, who ran a racing stud at Newmarket and owned the great runner Brown Jack. Looking for an artist to create a likeness of the horse and his jockey Steve Donoghue to present to the race course at Ascot, Munnings was chosen based on the Horner piece. Brown Jack stayed with Munnings for several weeks while the artist worked on sketches and the clay model. So impressed was he with the simple likeness of the horse by itself, Wernher abandoned the idea of including the jockey. (While he had him there at Castle House, Munnings also did a painting of Brown Jack.......)

Clay model Bronze

Painting in progress......

Upon his return from France in 1918, Munnings first stayed at the Chelsea Club, but with such a quantity of paintings he needed to find a London studio. This was secured with a two-year lease at 65 Glebe Place in Chelsea: the space included a bedroom and office, which enabled him to also live there.

His studio, the low white building with the two blue plaques

Photo copyright Paul Farmer CC BY-SA 2.0

Membership at the all-male Chelsea Club gave him a place for meals, the company of other artists -- and the opportunity for inappropriate behavior. He was suspended for using "bad language" in front of one of the female waitresses. With a grave face, the conveyor of the unhappy news informed him that, "It's a terrible thing to be suspended from a club". No matter -- he simply joined the many artists and creative souls at the Cafe Royal, where he felt right at home. And better still, not long after the Chelsea Club suspension he was invited to join the Arts Club on Dover Street, which was more expensive and elegant. He also joined the Royal Academy Dining Club, which met four times a year in private rooms at different large restaurants. The feather in his crown, however, was being taken by Sir Edward Lutyens to dine at the Garrick, the "club of all clubs", where he was invited to join their membership as well. Not long afterward the Chelsea Club reinstated him, but by then he had little time to go there.

Now established in London, the question was what to do about his five horses still in Cornwall, all his pictures, books, furniture in Swainsthorpe, and the studio there itself? The answer came in the form of two brothers from Scotland, the owners of Connell's Gallery on Bond Street. He had retrieved his Cornwall paintings before the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, and chose three pieces from those to submit. The Connell brothers bought all of them on Private View Day at the exhibition and then arrived at Glebe Place in the morning a few days later. They left with a large selection of his work, purchased outright for several thousand pounds.

With that purchase, as well as sales of other paintings and commissions, he was at last in a position to buy a home "somewhere in Suffolk with a river". Out with friends on a weekend looking at various properties they wound up in the little town of Dedham, in the heart of "Constable Country". And there he found his dream, Castle House.

Photo copyright Christopher Hilton CC BY-SAW 2.0

Immediately after his purchase he was gripped by panic and doubts over what he had done, and whether he'd have the ability to manage all his new expenses. But regaining some confidence, he had his studio from Swainsthorpe dismantled and transported first by train and then cart to the property, where it was reassembled behind the house, to be enlarged in later years.

A portion of the studio interior

To go with his house he found a wife, in the person of Violet McBride, an accomplished horsewoman and young divorcee. He first saw her at the Richmond Horse Show. Smitten by both her looks and her superb riding ability, he approached her about doing a painting and she turned him down. But after making inquiries about him and receiving favorable opinions about his abilities as an artist, she changed her mind and agreed to sit for him. They married in the summer of 1920.

It's easy to see her appeal as a painting subject....

Not long afterward the lease was due to run out on Glebe Place and he still needed a London-based studio. Violet found a vacant lot in Chelsea Park Gardens, on the corner of Chelsea Park and Beaufort Roads. Chelsea at that period was somewhat of a writers' and artists' colony, where at one time or another J.M.W. Turner, Whistler, Rossetti and John Singer Sargent had all lived and worked. Around 1921 Munnings had a home built, which he named Beldon House, after Beldon Hall, a house in a favorite Surtees book. The living room, dining room and bedroom were on the ground floor, and the floor above was largely his huge studio with skylights in the roof, that overlooked the walled garden in the back, where he planted three Plane tree saplings, one of which looks to possibly still be there today.

Beldon House

Photo copyright Spudgun67 CC BY-SA 2.0

He now had a wife and growing overhead, with multiple club memberships, homes in Dedham and London, his wife's hunting lodge in Withypool, Essex County, eventually another studio in Dedham, a collection of horses (he owned over 34 during his lifetime) and a great deal of money flowing out. Violet, who had taken over all his business needs and managed the household income, encouraged him to take on more commission work to meet expenses. Subjects of his own choosing became fewer and far between as the ever-growing commissions took up more of his time. In later years Violet admitted that "he was never such a good artist after he married me".

Those commissions were both a blessing and a curse. While they absorbed so much of his time, the social status of his clientele grew to impressive heights and eventually included the Royal Family. He was generally put up and treated like royalty himself at estates all around England and Europe. In 1924 an invitation to judge the 23rd annual exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, PA, stretched into a six-month painting spree along the east coast of the U.S., with commission work taking him up into Canada as well. The Americans embraced him, and while he enjoyed them and their hospitality in return, he missed home and was happy to return.

At about this time he made the decision to no longer work in watercolors. While he was equally as proficient in them as oils, and they sold well through his association with the Royal Watercolour Society, making the change back and forth from those to oils was becoming increasingly problematic.

The Frisky Pony 1903 (watercolor)

THE CHANTREY BEQUEST

With the idea of establishing a national collection of British art, in his will, Sir Francis Chantrey, a sculptor and member of the Royal Academy, bequeathed a fund for this purpose. Known as the Chantrey Bequest, its function was to purchase paintings and sculptures, with the funds being handled by the Royal Academy.

It was hoped that the works at some point would have their own gallery with exhibits for the public to enjoy, but that never came to bear, and following the death of Lady Chantrey in 1877, eighty-five works of art that had been purchased between that point and 1897 went into the newly founded Tate Gallery. The Bequest was the Tate's main funding source from 1897 until the 1920s, and the Gallery handles all exhibition of the collection.

For an artist to have their work chosen by the Chantrey was considered quite an honor, and the first painting of Munnings' to be purchased was an Epsom Downs piece with gypsies.......

Epsom Downs - City and Suburban Day 1919

The second purchase, in 1930, was a canvas Munnings did from Castle House in Dedham......

From My Bedroom Window 1930

After Munnings had completed the finished version of Their Majesties Return from Ascot it hung in the Royal Academy exhibit in 1926. Some years later with the painting back in his studio, Lord Sandwich and J.B. Manson, Chairman of the Tate Board and Director of the Gallery respectively, came to see Munnings about buying for the Tate a James Tissot painting, A Ball on Shipboard, that he owned. Spotting the Ascot painting they proposed it be acquired also, which was done in 1937, and it was hung once again at the Royal Academy as a 1938 Chantrey Bequest purchase. Munnings related in his autobiography The Second Burst (pg 275) that when Manson retired soon afterward as Director, his replacement, John Rothenstein, sent the painting into storage and wouldn't hang it.

Their Majesties Return from Ascot circa 1926

Detail......(Ater beginning the painting, as he worked his way across to the landau carriage, he found he was running out of room and had to have an extra section of canvas stitched on to be able to complete it.)

None of these works were exhibited in the Tate except for a brief period when they did a rehang in 2013. With the exception of a period of time when it was loaned out on exhibit at Windsor Castle, Their Majesties...... and Munnings' other two Chantrey paintings have remained in the Tate's basement for years on end, along with paintings and sculptures of many other noted artists, such as Lucy Kemp-Welch, Sargent, Whistler, Rossetti, Waterhouse, Reynolds, Stubbs, Landseer, Constable, Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh, Cezanne........

In 1928 there was a large exhibition of Munnings' work at Norwich Castle. Of the 86,000 people who visited in the six weeks it ran, one of the repeated visitors was a young Edward Seago, who had greatly admired Munnings' work. After the exhibit closed he traveled to Dedham to seek advice, which Munnings graciously gave out, encouraging the mostly self-taught artist to avail himself of formal schooling. Seago took a series of evening classes at the Norwich School of Art for a short period, and tutored some under Bertram Priestman, but basically continued to teach himself. His early equine work so strongly mimicked Munnings in both style and subject matter that viewers commented on it. When he was given his own show in 1929 at the Arlington Gallery in London, selling 23 of his 37 paintings on opening day, Munnings was not particularly pleased. And was even less so when Seago began seeking commission work from some of Munnings' clients, charging half as much for his fee. Munnings began to see him less as a protege to mentor and more of a competitor. It took Seago some time to finally find his own voice and style, but he went on to become one of Britain's finest landscape painters, whose work is still much admired and sought after today.

On a side note, in 1929 the artist Olive Branson, who Munnings had met at Calderon's School of Animal Art in Finchingfield, and who introduced him to the gypsies picking hops in Hampshire, was found dead in a well on her property in France. A gifted artist herself, Munnings had high praise after meeting her, calling her the best student in Calderon's school, who "stood miles apart from the rest". She had studied under Sir William Orpen and Augustus Johns, themselves noted artists, who also spoke highly of her talent.

Portrait of a Sleeping Greyhound (pencil, pen, ink and wash) Black Leopard (charcoal)

She had moved to France, eventually living in Les Baux, where she later bought a small hotel from the father of Francois Pinet, 18-years her junior, and her secret lover. Installing him as manager, she had written a will leaving the hotel to him upon her death. Initially ruled a suicide, upon closer investigation things looked fishy, and soon Pinet was arrested. He proclaimed his innocence and denied they were lovers, although that was later disproved. In spite of evidence of blood having been cleaned from inside the house, traces of it leading from her bedroom to the cistern she was found in, the impossibility of her being able to remove the heavy wooden lid on the top, a wire covering stapled over the opening to the well, a postmortem exam showing she was already dead when placed in the water, and the judge's plea that the jury reject the idea of suicide, the all-male jury acquitted Pinet, to applause in the courtroom and celebrations that night in Les Baux. No justice for Olive. Ironically the whole case served as inspiration for British author, E.R. Punshon to publish a mystery novel, Murder Abroad, based on the whole affair.

Around 1936, seeking more room to work in, Munnings leased one of the little buildings associated with the Old Grammar School in the village of Dedham. Converting a 40 x 60-foot portion into a large studio, he installed lighting, central heating, and a large skylight on the north side.

Before World War Two, he had made trips to the Norfolk coast in the autumn to paint and to sometimes stay at a friend's farm while Violet was down in Exmoor foxhunting. One visit he made by train with two of his horses. With his luggage sent on ahead, he traveled the 18-miles to the farm in Sedgeford from the Walsingham station, riding one horse and leading the other. He spent hours cantering along the beaches and stubbled, harvested fields, covering miles on end on some days. He was in Norfolk painting when Germany invaded Poland and the war broke out.

As events unfolded, and with his wife in Exmoor, he moved valuables and crucial items (including a sketchbook of Constable's that Violet had managed to purchase as a gift for him) from the studio in London to Castle House, safely away from the bombing. A Steinway Grand piano and furniture filled a hallway in 1940. During the war, the London house itself, which he described as a "dreary, hopeless muddle", received shrapnel damage to the roof and skylight. Worse was the irreplaceable loss of another James Tissot painting from his own collection, his "treasured" large canvas La Daneuse le Cord (a tightrope walker or "rope dancer"). He had loaned it to the Arts Club, which had been badly hit by a bomb and the painting was destroyed.

Other than some broken glass in the roof skylights, the Royal Academy's Burlington House, which had accommodations for the Academy President, didn't suffer as extensive bomb damage as the Tate Gallery did. The latter fortunately had all the artwork and records removed just before the war broke out, but it was left in very bad shape at the close of the conflict with damage to the roof, office windows blown out, and the floor set on fire in one gallery. It was eventually abandoned except for a portion used for an air raid shelter. Repairs and restoration came in 1946, but there is still visible shrapnel damage today.

Also an irreplaceable loss was a collection of paintings that Munnings had done around 1921 at Anthony de Rothschild's Southcourt Stud, where to his delight, he had been given free rein to stay an extended period of time to paint whatever struck his fancy, as well as the stable's famous runner and sire, Radium. The collection hung in Rothschild's Palace House in Newmarket, but in 1939 when the building was given over to house refugees, the paintings were moved to Christies in London for safe-keeping. The gallery suffered a direct hit from a bomb during the war and all the paintings were destroyed. Munnings didn't learn of this until he ran into Rothschild after the war at Ascot and was devastated when informed.

May Morning at Southcourt Stud circa 1923

Meanwhile, in 1939 before all this destruction unfolded, his studio in Dedham had been taken over to house refugee children, and then, as fears of invasion increased, the children were relocated again elsewhere, and troops moved into the building. All its contents, easels, canvases and furniture had to be removed and also stuffed into Castle House.

In 1940, the Battle of Britain began over Norfolk. East Anglia was particularly targeted, bearing the brunt of enemy air raids aimed at the RAF stations in Norfolk and Suffolk. Their effects being felt, evacuees were sent out into the countryside. Initially Munnings stayed busy at Castle House; his manservant Cooper and the latter's wife dug potatoes, picked apples, bottled fruit, made jam, melted pork lard from fat, and salted and melted butter into jars preparing for the war's severe food shortages that would come.

Before things grew untenable, Munnings also spent a good amount of time painting at various locations around the countryside. Invited to portray several of prominent Thoroughbred owner J.V. Rant's racers, Munnings spent several weeks in late summer at the storied racing stable Druids Lodge in Wiltshire. In letters to Violet, still safely ensconced down in Essex, he described being within hiking distance of Stonehenge, taking long walks while harvesting was in full swing, seeing white carthorses, a white bull, flocks of doves, the Rylye Valley and the Avon being "too beautiful"........ He proposed they give up property and acquire a caravan instead, in which to roam the countryside. Referring to this as one of his V.A.'s - "violent attachments" - Violet nipped that idea in the bud.

He also wrote her of seeing hundred of searchlights at night and the sound of German planes overhead. With the raging air battles near their climax and bombs falling worryingly close during serious raids, including near Druids Lodge itself, killing sheep and injuring horses nearby, he wrote Violet that he would join her in Essex.

He had hardly been in Withypool very long when he received a telegram informing him that the Army was requisitioning Castle House itself. Rushing back to Dedham, with bombs shaking the house the night he arrived, everything was crammed into three rooms in the house, with new locks installed on the doors, and the windows of the house and the studio boarded up. The contents of the wine cellar were hidden under a loose floorboard in the studio (forgotten about until eleven years later when discovered while searching for a rat). Along with his man Cooper and a groom, he joined Violet back at their home in Withypool, where they stayed for the duration of the war.

He had two of his original horses at Castle House, Anarchist and Winter Rose, spared from slaughter and shipped down to Withypool -- the others had to be destroyed due to the difficulty of getting hay and grain in Essex. This had to have been an incredibly painful and difficult decision for him to make. Those two joined four horses already down in Withypool and that little band was all that was left of the 17 horses when the war broke out.

Winter Rose behind the grey, Magnolia

Situated in Withypool for most of the war years, it in many ways was a happy time for Munnings while he was able to be there. He rented an upper loft room for a studio in the local pub, the Royal Oak, just down the road from their house.

The Royal Oak -- Photo copyright Nigel Mole CC BY-SA 2.0

The 300+ year-old establishment was owned at the time by Maxwell Knight, a radio broadcaster and spy-ring leader, who was the inspiration for Ian Flemming's character "M", boss of James Bond. The author R.D. Blackmore had written part of his novel Lorna Doone while frequenting the bar.

Munnings' home from the garden side. Photo courtesy and copyright Beth Munnings-Winter

Winter in Our Garden at Withypool

The little summer house at the back of the property. Munnings began working on An Artist's Life in this, the first volume of his three-part autobiography.

Photo courtesy and copyright Beth Munnings-Winter

He produced a great many plein air landscape paintings while in Exmoor. On one occasion, after riding twelve-miles to a suitable location he discovered he had forgotten to pack his brushes. Rather than make the trek back home, he made do with a variety of substitute devices, including tying bits of rags on sticks, chewing and fraying ends of little twigs attaching some matted grass to a fir cone.... going back again later, this time with brushes, he repainted the same view and claimed afterward that the two paintings looked identical.

Setting off to paint

He spent days riding for miles on the moors and countryside, painting landscapes, farm life, grazing horses, farmers' sheep, and the wild Dartmoor ponies. He had time to write poetry and was at peace with himself for the first time since his days in Cornwall.

Withypool Hill, Exmoor

Surveying the countryside

Porlock Hill on Essex

Getting into a domestic mode, he ground wheat for baking bread. In spite of an attack of gout in his right hand, one day in March he rode Anarchist to a neighbor's for a demonstration to learn how to make bread. On the way back home, Anarchist, feeling frisky in the brisk air, bucked him off. Landing on his back, he broke two ribs, had the wind knocked out of him, and related afterward how, while he was still laying on the ground, Anarchist "gently stood on my ankle to show his love and thankfulness". Considering the decades that he rode horseback, well into his senior years, compared to his wife he seemed to have few accidents and injuries.

On Anarchist back at Castle House

His blissful days would soon come to an end, however, with the arrival of a letter in December 1943.......

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Sir Alfred Munnings Part Four

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