Tomorrow I’m going to Strawberry Hill where some of Horace Walpole’s collection, dispersed at a sale in 1842, has come home from America. Yesterday I saw an exhibition not seen since 1919.
You may be unaware (I was) that Sir Alfred Munnings was blind in his right eye because of an accident. It made him unfit for service in the First World War. However, Max Aitken as he then was, later Lord Beaverbrook, got him a job as official war artist to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. His pictures were exhibited in 1919 at the Royal Academy. They have never been seen together until now at the National Army Museum in Chelsea.
They are well worth seeing. First, there are some forty oils all painted in the first six months of 1918. It is always interesting to see how an artist develops but it is unusual to see a body of work all executed in such a short time. At first sight they seem over-cleaned but my guess, I may be wrong, is that they have been kept out of natural light for a century and are as pristine as when Munnings painted them.
Munnings was born in 1878 making him seven years younger than another sometime equestrian artist, Jack Butler Yeats. Munnings is more figurative, Yeats more expressionist, or should that be impressionist? But there are similarities, comparisons that probably neither would have welcomed. The construction of Munnings’s pictures is skilful but do they look a little one dimensional? Well, he did have only one eye. Compare and contrast.
Well, it’s not fair. Today Yeats looks like Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and achingly desirable but maybe tomorrow Munnings’s technical mastery will be appreciated again. Munnings is certainly no slouch.
It’s pleasing that the National Army Museum has put on such a good exhibition and one that is unique in my lifetime. Unfortunately everything is skewed towards children. Children are not interested in Munnings. The visitors yesterday were not children. Anyway, good news, tickets are £6 subsidised by a contribution from HM Treasury LIBOR Fund. Isn’t it grand that some of the LIBOR fines end up at such an unexpected destination.
Munnings was not much of an artist although being PRA. But he has huge nostalgic appeal for me, at least. His WW1 oils shows my Father’s generation, which I can remember. He was a 7th DG. His regiment was in India when in 1914 he was on leave staying with his Aunt at Stornaway, and was recalled to France and I think he must have been attached to the 4DGs who were in the retreat from Mons. On patrol he ran up against an Uhlan patrol and charged with his troop, scattering them and returning, in triumph, with 2 prisoners. Only to be bollocked by his Colonel “We are retreating. What do you think we can do with prisoners? We can either shoot them or let them go!”
I associate Munnings with beautiful pictures of beautiful women. beautifully turned out on beautiful horses. Very nostalgic but I still prefer ‘Snaffles’ (Charles Payne}, contemporary and similar subject matter.
Lionel Edwards is another ontemporary of Munnings and very popular with hunting folk.