Sir Alfred Munnings

Christies, New York, June 6, 1986, lot 209;
London, Ackermanns, (inventory number 305864, vol. 4);
Mark Murray Fine Art, New York, by 1997;
Cross Gate Gallery, Lexington, Kentucky;
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1998.

The canvas is lined. The surface of the work is in excellent condition. There are slight handling marks along the 4 edges. Under UV; evidence of minute inpainting and there is some dripping of an oil or thinner along the right side of the work.
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Munnings' wife, Violet, was an avid hunter and for twenty years hunted on Exmoor, basing herself in a small cottage in Exford, the Mecca of western hunting. During the wars, the Munnings home, Castle House in Dedham was requisitioned by the military and so, to escape potential bombings, they moved, with their horses, to Exmoor. 

Munnings continued to paint on Exmoor throughout the1940's. " The urge to paint what he saw on Exmoor became a voracious appetite. To satisfy it he would take eight or ten canvases out with him and work on all of them..." (Reginald Pound, The Englishman, 1962, page 153). 

The hill in this present work is possibly Dunkery Beacon seen from Selsworthy, and it is clear that Munnings enjoyed recording the "freshness and unending procession of clouds-shapes" (Munnings, The Finish, 1952, page 67) as they danced across the sky, creating patterns of changing shadows over this Exmoor landscape. The visual impact of the image is enhanced by the patterns of hedgerows that criss-cross the scene, the straight lines contrasting with the rounded hilltop. The arrangement of clouds, opening to blue sky, diagonally dissects the sky and would intersect with the hedgerow at the cluster of pines on the right, thereby subconsciously drawing our eye across the image and giving movement to the scene.