Sir Alfred James Munnings, P.R.A., R.W.S.

London, Royal Academy, 1932, no. 53
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, Thirty-First Annual International Exhibition of Paintings, October 19-December 10, 1933, no. 151, pl. 43, illustrated
Cleveland Museum of Art, January 1-February 12, 1934
Toledo Museum of Art, March 4-April 15, 1934
London, 39 Grosvenor Square, Exhibition of British Country Life, June, 1937
Possibly, London, Leicester Galleries, An Exhibition of Paintings by A.J. Munnings, April - May, 1938, no. 11

To paint From my Bedroom Window, Summer, Munnings had a scaffolding built, anchoring it in great tubs of soil that stood beneath the dining room window, so that he might sit outside his second floor bedroom looking over a garden view he especially loved.  For two years (1930-31), Munnings worked on the painting on every May and June afternoon that offered sufficient sunlight, struggling against inclement weather to capture the rich range of greens across the lawns and to set down the effect of the grand chestnut trees flowering in the distance.

Munnings had been prompted to take up this summer view of his estate by the success of a winter painting of the same composition.  That picture (which, in contrast, had taken the artist only two days to complete in February, 1930) was shown at the Royal Academy the same year and acquired through the Chantrey Funds for the Tate Gallery.  Writing of From my Bedroom Window, Summer, Munnings acknowledged ruefully that his ease in recording the monochrome effects of that wintery grey scene, with snows melting into mud, had hardly prepared him for the frustrations of rapidly changing summer weather, or the difficulties of painting the monkey-puzzle tree at right with its shifting shadows!

In the foreground of From my Bedroom Window, Summer, Violet Munnings takes tea with a guest, attended by all three of the family dogs.  Several of the horses that both Munnings and his wife, an avid rider and huntswoman, so enjoyed graze in the paddock beyond (one of those horses, Chips, also appears in Going Out at Epsom, see lot 136).  Deliberately reminiscent of the country house portraits so popular among the great land-owners of eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, From my Bedroom Window, Summer celebrates Castle House, Munnings' own country home in Dedham, Essex, which he had acquired in 1920. The painting also quietly recognizes the achievements of Munnings' life.  He was at the top of his form in 1930, with invitations to work in the grandest homes and castles of England, painting race horses, equestrian portraits, and the most famed landscapes of the nation. In From my Bedroom Window, Summer, Munnings laid out the many satisfactions that his art had brought him.

In his memoirs, Munnings recalls his pride in the painting which he sent off to the Royal Academy exhibition of 1933 in an expensive frame, only to be horrified at the exhibition opening.  With all its softly nuanced greens, From my Bedroom Window, Summer, had been hung on a vibrant yellow wall, the remnant of a previous installation of Gauguins. The experience, he acknowledged, did nothing to improve his opinion of 'crude, modern French pictures that needed nursing on lemon-colored walls!'