In Focus: Alfred Munnings, the straight-talking, self-promoting artist who preached that art was ‘to fill a man’s soul with admiration and sheer joy’

Few with an interest in art have not heard of Sir Alfred Munnings’s 1949 resignation speech at the Royal Academy (RA). His blistering attack on modern art, broadcast on the BBC and hailed by the public, if not the art establishment, was the climactic moment in a relationship with the RA that began in 1899, when his first two paintings, Stranded (of two of his cousins in a rowing boat) and Pike Fishing in January (of kind local man ‘Jumbo’ Betts), were accepted for the Summer Exhibition. In his engaging autobiography, An Artist’s Life, he calls that moment ‘infinite bliss’ and, as he became known and sent works every year, he ‘dreaded being rejected and out!’

Becoming RA president in 1944 was ‘an honour’ and he walked home through bomb-blighted London full of ‘lofty hopes for the future of English art’. However, his romanticism and ardent admiration for his British forebears, from Reynolds to Millais and Lucy Kemp-Welch, caused a swell of feeling against the turn 20th-century art had taken. ‘What are pictures for?’ he asked. ‘To fill a man’s soul with admiration and sheer joy, not to bewilder and daze him.’ Modern artists were guilty of ‘affected juggling’, anathema to Munnings’s egalitarian aims. Students were learning ‘to become what? Not artists’.

When Churchill urged him to revive the Academy Banquet, with ‘Let’s have a rag’, the convivial Munnings eagerly agreed: ‘A rag — and a good party — that was the thing.’ Standing up to speak, he remembered Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, saying that Picasso was a finer artist than Reynolds and launched into his excoriation of the art world. He accused it of ‘shilly-shallying’ and stated he would rather have ‘a damned bad failure, a bad, muddy old picture where somebody has tried… to set down what they have seen’.

His apoplectic words did him no damage: he wrote of receiving floods of letters in support and, in 1956, a retrospective at the RA resulted in queues to Piccadilly. His auction record is nearly $8 million, for The Red Prince Mare in New York, US, in 2004. Now, he is being celebrated with an exhibition from the British Sporting Art Trust, curated by Katherine Field, who remarks his continuing neglect by the critical establishment: ‘I was astounded that an artist of such technical mastery and brilliance seemed to have no place in the academic curriculum.’ The catalogue includes a foreword by The Duchess of Cornwall and essays by the likes of sculptor and Munnings historian Tristram Lewis, who emphasises the artist’s skill in bronze, as well as paint.

Munnings describes his rural childhood as the son of a yeoman miller in Mendham, Suffolk, with great affection. Neither of his parents was artistic, but they recognised the boy’s talent and he was apprenticed at the age of 14 to lithographic firm Page Brothers and Co, where his talent and humour emerged in advertisements for Colman’s Mustard and Caley & Son. In the evenings, he studied at the Norwich School of Art under Walter Scott, to whom he pays tribute in An Artist’s Life, together with the Castle Museum and Art Gallery curator James Reeve, who ‘lectured me on thoroughness in work’, and John Shaw Tomkins, director of Caley’s Chocolate, ‘full of energy and ideas’, who took Munnings around Europe.

A formative experience for the gregarious artist was his first trip to the races, with Ralph Wernham at Bungay, the ‘most vividly coloured phase of life I had yet seen’. The whirl of horses and punters inspired Munnings and he returned frequently to the racetrack throughout his career, capturing with dexterity the jostle of movement at the start, the flash of coloured silks and the horses’ gleaming flanks. His last ever commission was to paint The Queen’s Derby runner-up, Aureole, in which the Stubbs-like pose of the restless horse and vividly depicted people are given energy by the impressionistic sky.

That last work was one of many grand commissions and portraits, from the Rothschild stud to Paul Mellon (whom he castigated for misidentifying a pollarded oak), and from Churchill, whom he also taught, to the Prince of Wales. The work gave him financial security and a glittering social life, yet he rued the effort and travel involved and was most content in the country, sketching.