Lot Essay
In 1903-04 Munnings was working on a large painting, some 64 by 80 in., of a huntsman. He produced a group of smaller works of this subject depicting a rider taking a fence from various angles. The model for these works was Nobby Gray, the van-dweller and traveller who wintered in a meadow by the Red Lion, and went each summer to Woolpit in Suffolk with swinging-boats, coconut shies and a shooting-gallery. Nobby, his wife Charlotte and son Fred were frequent models from this period, as Munnings remarked: 'I dare not begin to think what I should have done without the Grays ... Nobby was a philosopher. Life was full of interest for him, and he knew a lot about Suffolk - High Suffolk, he called it. Walsham-le-Willows was his paradise' (An Artist's Life, Suffolk, 1950, p.113).