Property of a Gentleman Sir Alfred James Munnings, P.R.A. 1878-1959

London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of Works by Sir Alfred J Munnings, K.C.V.O., P.P.R.A., 1956, no.305 (wherein dated c.1935);

London, Sotheby's, An English Idyll: A Loan Exhibition of Works by Sir Alfred Munnings, 2001, no.73, illustrated in colour in the exhibition catalogue.

Sir Alfred Munnings, The Second Burst, Museum Press Ltd., London, 1951, pp.124-125;

Reginald Pound, The Englishman, A Biography of Sir Alfred Munnings, Heineman, London, 1962, p.212;

Jean Goodman, A.J. - The Life of Sir Alfred Munnings, 1878-1959, Erskine Press, Norwich, 2000, p.195.

Early Morning on Manton Downs was commissioned by Viscount Astor, shown at the great Munnings retrospective at the Royal Academy in 1956 and then remained unseen in public until it was lent to Sotheby’s for An English Idyll: A Loan Exhibition of Works by Sir Alfred Munnings in January 2001. It is an example of Munnings’s work at his most lyrical; a painting where commission and artistic sensibility effortlessly coincide.

William Waldorf 2nd Viscount Astor (1879-1952) was amongst the pre-eminent owner-breeders during the first half of the 20th century. His involvement in racing began whilst still an undergraduate at New College with the purchase of Conjure for £100. She became the foundation mare for his stud at Cliveden together with two other famous mares Popinjay and Maid of the Mist. Lord Astor bred and owned winners of eleven Classic races between 1917 and 1945: the 2000 Guineas with Craig an Eran (1921), Pay Up (1936) and Court Master; the 1000 Guineas with Winkipop (1910) and Saucy Sue (1925); The Oaks with Sunny Jane (1917), Pogrom (1922), Saucy Sue (1925), Short Story (1926) and Pennycomequick (1929) and the St Leger with Book Law (1927). Only the Derby eluded him, though he had the runner-up on five occasions between 1918 and 1924 with Blink, Buchan, Craig an Eran, Tamar and St. Germans. All his great winners came from the home stud; when he died in 1952 at the age of 73 he had been a breeder of thoroughbreds for fifty years.

Morning on Manton Downs dates from the decade of Astor’s greatest racing success and from that in which Munnings established his reputation internationally with commissions from the Royal Family and cosmopolitan society on both sides of the Atlantic. Its subject is Short Story the bay filly foaled in 1923, by Buchan (Derby runner-up in 1919) out of Long Suit. Following a third in the 1000 Guineas, she appreciated the step up in distance and had beaten Resplendent, Gay Bird and thirteen other runners to victory in the Oaks in 1926. The picture appeared in the 1956 RA exhibition with a note dating it circa 1935. However it was reproduced in the first book on the artist by Lionel Lindsay, published in 1927 with a caption noting the Oaks win and is clearly a contemporary commemoration of the triumph.

Lord Astor’s horses were trained, without exception, by Alec Taylor, seen here with Short Story. Taylor was in Munnings’s words ‘the most famous of trainers’. Known as the ‘Wizard of Manton’, he was the third generation after both his father and grandfather at the historic Manton stables near Marlborough. Leading trainer twelve times, seven of them in succession, Alec Taylor trained for many of the important owners of the day. He had the winners of 1003 races in England worth over £839,000 and among this total were twenty Classic successes including three Derbys. Following two of these in 1917 and 1918, the colts went on to win the Triple Crown.

The elements of the painting are thus legendary and yet as Munnings’s biographer notes with characteristic understatement Morning on Manton Downs ‘…is a picture of more than horses from a famous stable’ (Reginald Pound, op.cit., p.212). The composition derives from Munnings’s famous Lady Torrington’s Rich Gift, (private collection) the picture that was to become the model for many others between the Wars. As Kenneth McConkey points out, its format is borrowed from Stubbs and Marshall ,‘artists who according to Munnings eschewed classicism and foreign influence, and who in their horse portraits address the ‘life’ of the nation (see intro., An English Idyll, op.cit., p.110). Here the format is elaborated upon. Horse and lad are reversed, the distinguished trainer appears on his grey to the left, a jockey prepares to mount. They are painted against the far-ranging low hills that Munnings described in a letter to Violet as ‘miles and miles of England’. The sun casts long shadows and in the background a string of horses unwinds from a dip in the land softening the scene. Early mornings on the Downs above Manton were a time of day and a part of the country Munnings loved. A description in his autobiography was written at the time of a later commission but nothing at Manton had changed. As often Munning’s effusive enthusiasm and unremarkable prose reminds us by contrast of his skill and subtlety in evoking the lyricism of the scene on canvas:

‘The sounds are the rarest: sheep-bells faint and sweet, like the sound of a cow lowing; the hum of bees. The scent of a thousand tiny flowers is in the air… What a place! What peace! And as I write behold coming up from a fold in the Downs there appear first a row of men’s heads, then their figures, then the horses. A long string over thirty I can count, with trainer and head-lad, and following in their wake a very small boy in knickerbockers on an old cob.’ (Munnings op.cit., p.129).

As well as place, the picture also records the horses of a patron the artist both liked and admired as a racing man. (Munnings had too an enormous liking for his indomitable wife Nancy declaring, ‘There is no one like Lady Astor’.) The setting is informal and characteristic of an owner who shared with Munnings a love of land and the country life of England, often coming himself to Manton to see the early morning gallops. Of a number of works painted for Lord Astor most are of horses in the paddock at Cliveden or stables at Newmarket and elsewhere. In others he is depicted giving way to these stars or watching them comfortably from a shooting stick at home rather than amidst the public hubbub of the racecourse. It is an appropriate record perhaps for a man who never went racing unless he had a runner and never had a bet in his life.

This shared sensibility lifts Early Morning on Manton Downs beyond pedestrian requirements. In 1927 equestrian portraiture had not yet become tedious for him or driven by clients to repetitive composition. Mary Chamot writing a decade later could still observe that ‘Munnings holds the field [in sporting painting] almost alone. Perhaps the explanation is that most sporting people have little knowledge of painting and are satisfied with any sufficiently representative rendering of the subject. He is a brilliant technician, knows how to make his brush-work, as well as his colour, expressive of form and of course he has a perfect knowledge of his subject…’ (Mary Chamot, Modern Painting in England, Country Life Ltd., 1937, p.92 quoted by Kenneth McConkey, op.cit., p.20). It is this brilliance coupled not just with a perfect knowledge, but with great love of his subject as well as the mutual admiration between artist and patron that so often results in his most inspired work. Munnings himself recognised this. When in 1956 he corresponded with Humphrey Brooke over the content of his retrospective at the Royal Academy – "Not too many of those commissioned pictures" he instructed repeatedly (Pound op.cit., p.211). It was telling that this did not apply to the Astor family who lent six commissioned works to the exhibition – no other private owner sent more.

Paintings such as Early Morning on Manton Downs inspired the subtitle ‘An English Idyll’ for Sotheby’s exhibition. They account for the peculiar potency which Munnings’ work assumed in the Edwardian and inter-war years of the last century. They form his legacy as a unique observer of English social history and a painter of great beauty. Above all, they have ensured his central place in English art. It remains unmatched by any other sporting artist of his time.