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

Frost and Reed, London (by 1926)
Philip Suval (by 1927)
Mrs. Frances P. Garvan (and sold: Christie's, London, December 11, 1970, lot 170)
Richard Green Fine Paintings (acquired at the above sale)

London, Royal Academy, 1926, no. 52
Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, International Exhibition, 1927, no. 224
New York, Howard Young, Paintings of Horses, Sporting Events and English Life, February 11-23, 1929, no. 17
New York, Wildenstein and Co., Alfred J. Munnings, Images of Turf and Field, April 28-June 3, 1983, no. 28
Saratoga Springs, National Museum of Racing, The Mastery of Munnings, July 8-September 4, 2000

For the Royal Academy exhibition in 1926, the year after Alfred Munnings was elected a full member of the Academy, he sent two large scale paintings of Their Majesties, the King and Queen, traveling in their royal carriage through Windsor Park on their way to and from the Ascot races -- paintings full of gilt, glamour, and regalia. The Ascot paintings represented an extraordinary commission for Munnings and they anointed him as a major artist of the English social order and particularly the  realm of horses, racing and royalty.  Proud as he was of the Ascot procession pictures, however, Munnings also included another racing world painting, nearly as large, in his Royal Academy presentation of 1926, this time a painting of the Derby racing world: Gypsies on Epsom Downs, Derby Week.

Not immediately obvious as a racing scene, perhaps, Gypsies on Epsom Downs, Derby Week was just as significant a record of the greater social surround of British horse racing as the ceremonial arrival of the King and Queen at Ascot.  Horse traders and trainers of world-wide renown, the gypsies were an important presence in the racing world; and the arrival of a large train of colored caravans, covered carts, and beautiful horses on the grassy hills outside the Epsom race course was a picturesque spectacle as telling of Derby traditions as the carriage park of the aristocratic owners and ostentatious gamblers.

Munnings painted gypsy carts in his country fair paintings as early as 1902; his Royal Academy diploma picture of the Kilkenny Horse Fair was a view of horse trading commotion, rain and mud and all; and since 1913, Munnings had been spending nearly every September in the Hampshire hill country, attending the hop harvest and painting the encamped gypsies who provided the  harvest's skilled labor  (see lot 167).  He loved the open ways of the gypsies, he enjoyed their affection for animals (he bought a treasured dog from them); and the pleasure of painting their colorful wagons, the women's elaborate dress-up-day costumes,  and the troupe of accompanying children, goats and poultry brought Munnings back again and again.  Indeed, although the idea of Gypsies on Epsom Downs, Derby Week was surely born of an encounter during the Derby racing week at Epsom, and probably laid out in a number of small sketches made on that site, it is very likely that Munnings actually produced this large final version of the painting in Hampshire, among the "hop-pickers" as he often called them.  There, he would have had more time to lay out the extraordinary frieze of characters, animals and wagons of Gypsies on Epsom Downs, Derby Week; to order the elaborate tapestry of color effects; and to cajole his favorite models into posing for him in their finest hats. 

A gypsy encampment was an entire world. Against a low horizon line of painted wagons and beehive tents, Munnings assembled a group of gypsies of all ages settled on stools and chairs.  Perhaps they've been to the race course or are just back from the stalls on the edges of the camping ground where they sold brushes, brooms and halters that were the women's industry as their families moved around the countryside.  Children play in front of a pup tent in the distance, one of the greyhounds that the gypsies bred for racing watches from the left.  

Munnings' mastery of horses of all types and dispositions often brought him comparisons to George Stubbs.  His love of the English countryside, especially of the fields and waterways of his native East Anglia, and his ability to craft an extraordinary sky, made connections between Munnings and John Constable inevitable.  What is less often observed is how carefully Munnings had studied the social painters of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, the artists like Wootton, Gainsborough, or Wright of Derby, who wrote the social history of the British nation in their paintings.  Munnings was a master of the conversation piece as well as the sporting picture.  He could paint the king and queen at the races one week, the traveling people the next.