Sir Alfred Munnings: horse painter, war artist and society portraitist

Sir Alfred Munnings was one of the finest British Impressionist painters of the 20th century. His life — which was spent mainly in ‘Constable Country’ in the village of Dedham, on the Suffolk-Essex border — is reflected in a body of work that largely depicts rural scenes, racing and hunting, and most commonly his favourite animal, the noble horse.

Munnings’s consummate skill in equine portraiture stemmed from a childhood spent admiring and sketching horses at his parents’ Suffolk mill. Today, his horse paintings remain among his most celebrated and collectable works. In the past decade, pictures of horse racing and hunting have dominated the artist’s 10 highest prices at auction (the exception was The White Canoe, arguably the most beguiling non-equestrian subject that Munnings painted).

As a young man at the turn of the 20th century, Munnings was fascinated by the vagabond existence of the Traveller communities he met while exploring the country on horseback. Their unconventional lifestyle and brightly coloured clothes and wagons inspired many of his early pictures.

Around this time, Munnings also employed a young stable boy known as ‘Shrimp’, who reportedly shared his fondness for a stiff drink. Shrimp modelled for many of the artist’s pre-war pictures, such as Shrimp Leading Ponies Across the Ringland Hills, Norfolk, which sold for $650,000 at Christie’s in 2021.

Munnings married his first wife, the artist Florence Carter-Wood, in 1912, but there were problems from the outset. She tried to take her own life on their honeymoon.

Between Munnings’s work commitments in London and fox-hunting trips around the country, Carter-Wood often found herself alone at their home in Cornwall.

Following an affair with Gilbert Evans, a young captain in the Monmouth Regiment, she died by suicide in July 1914. The ménage was the subject of the 2014 film Summer in February. Because of the brief nature of their relationship, paintings of Carter-Wood by Munnings are scarce.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Munnings had volunteered for service. Blindness in his right eye — the result of an accident at the age of 20 — together with his love of horses, led to him being given a civilian job processing tens of thousands of the animals as they headed to the front lines in France.

He was later posted to the Western Front, where he worked at a horse remounting depot, before being commissioned as an official war artist to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. In this role, he painted portraits of Canadian generals and their steeds, as well as pictures of the Canadian Forestry Corps working at lumber mills as part of the war effort. More than 40 of his war paintings were exhibited in 1919 at the Royal Academy in London in an acclaimed show that brought him widespread recognition.

In 2018-19, the exhibition Alfred Munnings: War Artist, 1918 was held at the National Army Museum in London and the Munnings Art Museum in his former home in Dedham, Essex. Comprised of 41 paintings on loan from the Canadian War Museum in Ottowa, alongside Munnings’s surviving sketchbooks from the museum’s own collection, the exhibition explored the crucial role of horses in the conflict.

After the war, Munnings’s equine portraits attracted the attention of patrons on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Rothschild and Astor families, as well as the Dukes of Marlborough and Westminster, who all commissioned portraits. He also painted the Duke of Windsor and, towards the end of of his career, Queen Elizabeth II with her champion racehorse, Aureole, at the Epsom Derby in 1954, a version of which sold at Christie’s in London in 2016 for £2,098,500. Munnings excelled as a portraitist, yet he found the travel involved gruelling, and lamented that he longed for a quiet, carefree life in the country.

The academic pinnacle of Munnings’s career came with his election as president of the Royal Academy in 1944. Always a controversialist, he railed against modernism, which he parodied in paint and also in a speech he gave at a Royal Academy dinner attended by his friend Winston Churchill. It was broadcast on the radio, and although it caused uproar among the artistic intelligentsia, it received much popular support.

The author of Munnings’s catalogue raisonné, Lorian Peralta-Ramos, connects the artist’s loathing of modernism with the sadness he felt at the disappearance of pastoral life in Britain. ‘It was heart-wrenching for him to see the horse replaced by the machine,’ says the author.

Works such as A barge on the Stour, Dedham and The Fairground illustrate how Munnings never strayed far from his realist roots. Pictures, the artist said, were supposed ‘to fill a man’s soul with admiration and sheer joy, not to bewilder and daze him’.

The success he experienced enabled him to purchase his dream home in 1919, while still a relatively young man. Castle House in Dedham was where he lived and worked with his second wife, Violet McBride, until his death in 1959.

The artist’s beloved Castle House is now, as he wished, the Munnings Art Museum, home to the largest collection of his work in the world, along with the preserved contents of his studio and other parts of the dwelling.

The Old Masters to Modern Day Sale: Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture is on view until 30 June 2026 at Christie’s in London

Explore the London Classic Week sales

Related artists: Sir Alfred James Munnings