For our first film this month, a little background to Sir Alfred Munnings
Summer in February, focuses on the real-life love triangle between three members of group of Bohemian artists, the Lamorna Group, who lived and worked near Penzance in Cornwall in the early twentieth century. They settled there mainly for the quality of the Cornish light, cheap living and the abundance of subjects and models. One of the artists was Alfred Munnings (1878 – 1959), played in the film by Dominic Cooper, and seen, right, as he was painted in 1911 by Harold Knight.
Munnings was unfit for war service in 1917 but had a civilian job processing thousands of horses for the Western Front, eventually moving to a remount depot in France. He had studied at the Norwich School of Art and was a painter before the war and this talent was put to use with the Canadian Cavalry Brigade as a war artist. He produced drawings, watercolours and oil paintings that underlined the importance of horses in war which was critical and under-reported. Munnings’ career would be associated with equine painting (below, note the artist in his signature hat) – horses hunting and racing – works that now command seven-figure sums at auction.
Munnings was elected president of the Royal Academy of Art in 1944 (the year he was knighted) but, fiercely anti-modernist, he was to become best known during his presidency for a wine-fuelled speech, broadcast to the nation by the BBC, denouncing Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso. He recalled the occasion when Winston Churchill said to him “Alfred, if you meet Picasso coming down the street would you join me in kicking his…something something?” to which Munnings replied “Yes Sir, I would”.
As a 1950s schoolboy in Suffolk I remember going through ‘Constable country’ Dedham, on the Suffolk-Essex border, and being shown a large Georgian house in the main street and being told: that’s old Munnings’ house. After his death, Munnings’ widow opened their home as a museum of his work. Castle House, Dedham, may be visited between 1st April and 31st October. Ed
