Sir Alfred James Munnings, P.R.A., R.W.S.

Pawsey & Payne, London
WP Thursby, Esp.
Property of a Lady (and sold: Sotheby's, London, December 13, 2005, lot 68, illustrated)
Private Collection, United Kingdom

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work is in excellent condition. The canvas is unlined. The cracking to the paint layer is slightly raised but not unstable. The paint layer is clean. There are no structural damages. There are a few tiny dots of retouch above the neck of the white horse and in the dark color above the tail of the foal.
"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."

Set at dawn or early evening, Wending Home takes its inspiration from the rural life in which Munnings, the son of a miller, had grown up. A farm boy leads a grey mare and her foal home, silhouetted against a golden sky with the light filtering through the trees and casting a halo around the horses’ backs and legs. The grey mare was frequently used as a model from 1902 and must have belonged to Munnings' father or a neighbor. The artist presents this subject in a frieze-like composition, with horses and boy parallel to the picture plane, as he had in several works made before the First World War. A larger watercolor version of Wending Home, dated 1906, was in the collection of Phyllis Wyeth (see: Wildenstein, Alfred J. Munnings: Images of Turf and Field, exh. cat., 1983, no. 107, illustrated).

The present lot was painted in 1911 after Munnings had completed his lithographic apprenticeship at Page Bros. in Norwich and returned to the family home, Mill House in Mendham on the river Waveney, which divides Norfolk from Suffolk. He bought the old carpenter’s shop as a studio and struck out on his own as a painter. He immersed himself in the rhythms of the Suffolk countryside, and painted East Anglia in the last decades in which the horse dominated rural life and before industrial mechanization swept away this gentle world forever.