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

Wildenstein & Co., New York
The Estate of Barbara Whitney Headley
Kenneth and Hazel Roe, Greenwich,Connecticut
Thence by descent to the present owners

In the asymmetric composition of Parade to the Post, Kempton Park, with horses and their riders stepping smartly away from the crowded gang entering on the left into the open, undefined turf of the right, Sir Alfred Munnings emphasized the interlocked drama and elaborate decorum that make British horse racing such an elegant spectacle.  Choosing a low view of the parade -- he worked from the steps of an old paddock -- allowed Munnings to set the horses and jockeys against the distintcive wooded line that characterized the park setting of the Kempton course.  With the sky thus closed off by the large trees, Munnings darkened the color key of the entire painting and gave the shining horses and glossy silks an unusual brilliance in their green surround.

Munnings seldom depicted an actual race, preferring those nervous, tense moments leading to a Start over the grand plunge of a Finish.  Beginning about 1940, when his well-established success and the restrictions of war-time allowed the artist to forego much of the commissioned work that had plagued him in the preceding decade, Munnings devoted a significant portion of his energies to painting various 'Starts' as he called them.  These scenes of horses and riders walking proudly out of the paddock, circling restively around each other, or crowding into the starting line presented Munnings with continual challenges of invention and they have become a defining image of his art.  While most of the Munnings's Starts depict the broad, open heathland of the Newmarket courses near his Dedham home, he made made smaller groups of parade and start pictures at other courses as well, quickly realizing the importance of finding the identifying features that would establish the character of each track. Kempton Park was a (relatively) young track outside London, near Hampton Court, established in 1878 on a large country estate.  Famed for its steeplecases and winter racing calendar, Kempton Park differed from Newmarket or Epsom in its encircling stands of trees that had been preserved when the courses were laid out. 

Munnings probably began to frequent races at Kempton Park during the second world war, when his Dedham home was requistioned by the military and he often stayed in London for Royal Academy business.  There are four known compositions featuring parades or horses 'going out' at Kempton Park, all with horses all similar in brown, but each clearly distinquished by form and markings, and each with a distinct demeanor in the close gang of horses. The jockeys all looking away from each other, clearly alert to every movement around them; and in a typically witty Munnings' observation, the trainers that lead the horses are all masked by the profiled animals, reduced to little more than human legs interspersed among the sleeker limbs of the animals.  Munnings was working on the Kempton Park theme around 1950, as an unfinished variant of Parade to the Post, Kempton Park is reproduced in the third volume of his autobiography, (Munnings, The Finish, London, 1952, following p. 216). 

This catalouge note was written by Alexandra Murphy.