SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS
British, 1878 – 1959
Calcot Park
Signed A.J. MUNNINGS
Oil on canvas
20 x 24 inches (50.8 x 61 cm)
Framed: 31 x 35 inches (78.8 x 89 cm)
This work was painted in 1917 when the artist took a wartime position with the Remounts Depot. As Munnings describes it in his autobiography, he had written to his friend and fellow artist Major Cecil Aldin, “who, besides being Master of the South Berkshire Hounds, was a Depot Remount officer. A letter came back from him, ‘Come at once.’… He was in charge of horses which were spread all over the district, and thousands more were coming from Canada every week.” Munnings was placed in a village close to Calcot Park, Berkshire, where “from then on [he] lived amongst thousands of horses.” (Sir Alfred Munnings, An Artist’s Life, London, 1950, p. 300).
Provenance
Robert Younger, Baron Blanesburgh (1861-1946)
Private Collection, UK (by descent from the above, until 2022)
Private Collection, New York
Exhibited
London, James Connell & Sons, Exhibition of Paintings by A.J. Munnings, 1919, no. 13 (In Calcot Park) or no. 15 (June Afternoon Calcot Park)
Literature
Lorian Peralta-Ramos, Tradition and Modernity and the Works of Sir Alfred Munnings, Middleburg, Virginia [forthcoming], illustrated
$90,000