Lot 114
  • 114

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

Estimate
300,000 - 500,000 USD
bidding is closed

Description

  • Sir Alfred J. Munnings, P.R.A.
  • The Gypsy Encampment (Hop-Pickers' Fires)
  • signed A. J. Munnings (lower left)

  • oil on canvas
  • 21 1/4 by 24 1/4 in.
  • 53.9 by 61.6 cm

Provenance

Ian MacNicol, Glasgow
Wildenstein & Co, New York (as Hop-Pickers Fires)
Sale: Christie's, London, May 13, 1966, lot 41
Sale: Sotheby's, London, June 30, 1993, lot 13, illustrated (as A Gypsy Encampment)
Private Collection, Connecticut
MacConnell-Mason, London, 1998

Exhibited

Possibly, New York, Howard Young Gallery, Horses, Sporting Events and English Life by A.J. Munnings, R.A., February 11-23, 1929, no.15

 

Condition

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This painting is in beautiful state. The canvas is unlined, the paint layer is stable and the canvas is well stretched. The only restorations that have been added are along the extreme top edge and address a little frame abrasion. While there may conceivably a few small dots in the dark color above the dog on the right side, it seems unlikely. The paint layer is slightly thinned in the lower portion, particularly the lower right quadrant, yet we feel that this is the artist's intention rather than any abrasion which may have happened subsequently. The picture should be hung as is.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Catalogue Note

For a dozen years before and after the first world war, the most intensive campaign of painting in Alfred Munnings' year came every autumn, when he traveled to Binsted in Hampshire, southwest of London, to paint the colorful throng of gypsies and itinerant farmworkers who congregated for the annual hops harvest.  Amid the melange of caravans, tents, and rickety carts, the dozens of families and hundreds of animals, Munnings was smitten by possible paintings at every turn.  One of the first observations that he noted, the soft, blue-gray wood smoke that drifted low between the campsites from the ubiquitous cooking fires stayed with him for more than forty years, making its way into his autobiography, long after providing the impulse for The Gypsy Encampment or Hop-pickers' Fires.  A fresh, rapidly realized twilight scene, The Gypsy Encampment displays Munnings' well-developed facility with a brush, as well as his newly acquired interest in delicately nuanced color affects (a legacy of his recent work among the Newlyn Impressionist colony in 1911-13).

The boisterous, welcoming ways of the gypsies fascinated Munnings as much as their extravagantly decorated caravans and eccentric costumes.  His old Norfolk friends and models, Nobby Grey and his wife Charlotte (who had Romany blood), had introduced the artist to the traveling life some years earlier, but it was in the Binsted meadow that Munnings really began to understand the complexity of the gypsies' unsettled lives and their strongly defended traditions.  His many campaigns among the Binsted hop-pickers culminated in a dozen of the artist's most admired large paintings: Departure of the Hop-Pickers (National Art Gallery, Melbourne)  Epsom Downs: City and Suburban Day (Tate Gallery, London) or Gypsie Life (Art Gallery, Aberdeen), all highly lauded at annual Royal Academy exhibitions and shortly thereafter acquired by important museum collections.  Less well known are the smaller compositions and studies -- among them The Gypsy Encampment -- in which Munnings' careful examination of the gypsy families with whom he built longstanding ties provides the details and incidents that sustain those larger compositions.  In The Gypsy Encampment, gestures such as the young woman balancing a saucer on her finger tips, or observations such as the single felt-hatted, waistcoated man standing at the edge of a family group of four women, are first recorded, to be pondered by Munnings and reinserted later in further works. But it is the delicate, wafting smoke that winds through The Gypsy Encampment, lending its faint blue tint to the clothing, veiling the massive caravan, and weaving the entire figure group into their cluttered campsite and the lowering sky that especially held Munnings' eye this evening.

This catalogue entry was written by Alexandra Murphy.