SIR ALFRED JAMES MUNNINGS, P.R.A., R.W.S. | GYPSY CARAVAN

George Jewson (acquired from the artist)

Sale: Sotheby's, London, November 10, 1981, lot 107, illustrated

Acquired at the above sale

The gypsies of the British Isles, as Sir Alfred Munnings would have referred to the members of several semi-nomadic groups including the Roma, Tinkers, and Irish Travellers, are distantly descended from East Europeans; they moved through the English countryside working as farm hands, metal craftsmen, and horse traders. The son of an East Anglian miller who kept numerous horses for hauling and for carriage use, Munnings grew up around country fairs and the horse traders who frequented them, their picturesque wagons and flamboyantly exotic costumes providing a subject that the artist would return to over and over again throughout his career. The artist reminisced in his auto-biography, “of all my painting experiences, none were so alluring and colorful as the visits spent amongst the gypsy hop-pickers in Hampshire each September. More glamour and excitement were packed into those six weeks than a painter could well contend with” (Sir Alfred Munnings, An Artist’s Life, London, 1950, p. 287).

While brilliantly painted gypsy wagons and Romany horse trainers appear as local details in Munnings art as early as 1902, the present work was completed in 1910, around the time the artist purchased his own caravan for his excursions to the Ringland Hills. It may be the work titled The Roving Life that he displayed at the Royal academy in 1910. A caravan, under the control of a gypsy woman, slowly moves down a wooded pathway, surrounded by goats, cows and horses. Against a predominantly cool color scheme of sky blue and varying greens that sharpen or soften as the light moves across them, Munnings enlivens the composition with complementary salmon-red accents on the spokes of the wagon wheels and in the driver’s costume. The rapid brushwork is a reminder of the artist’s propensity for plein-air painting, as well as the constant movement of shifting light conditions.