Sir Alfred J. Munnings, P.R.A.

J. W. Woods, Ottawa by 1958
E. Jay Rousuck, New York
Thence by descent to the present owners

Throughout his life, Munnings proclaimed his affection for his native East Anglia with his painting and his poetry, recalling with particular pleasure the myriad reedy-waterways through which he had paddled and the river banks along which he'd lain enjoying the sun and admiring the sky. In the present work, a summery riverscape painted in Norfolk circa  1911, Munnings celebrates just such a scene, perhaps along the Waveney River where he had grown up, or the Stour, made famous by the nineteenth-century painter, John Constable, whose art Munnings deeply admired.  To this  wholly English scene, Munnings brought an exquisite command of French impressionist technique and a highly personal sense of color. 

A screen of summer grasses and waving wildflowers, closely observed and crisply painted, fills the foreground, cropped through at mid-length, as if the painter were seated deep among the wind-blown plants.  In the middleground, tall willows sway above a small troop of cows grazing by a curve of river.  The willows frame a distant view of a square tower that may well be St. Mary's parish church of Dedham, one of Constable's favorite landmarks.  In the skilled, loose brushwork of the present work and the cleverly compressed distances of the composition, Munnings' study of the French artists Bastien-Lepage and Claude Monet, honed during several brief stays in Paris, can be detected.

The present work belonged for many years to E. Jay Rousuck, a director of the gallery Scott and Fowles, who was a principal force in bringing Munnings work to the United States through his organization of exhibitions of Munnings's works and a long association with the Wildenstein Gallery.

This catalogue note was written by Alexandra Murphy.