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

Sale: Sotheby's, London, 1958, lot 94
Sale: Sotheby's, London, June 19, 1974, lot 86
Senator John Warner, Middleburg, Virginia 
The Sporting Gallery, Middleburg, Virginia 
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1976 and sold, Sotheby's, New York, November 30, 2006, lot 111, illustrated)
Acquired at the above sale

Sir Alfred Munnings, An Artist's Life, London, 1950, pp.  247-48, detail illustrated opp. p. 193

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work is in beautiful condition. It is quite heavily painted, but extremely well preserved. The light glaze in the face of the rider and the soft touches in the picture, such as those in the faces of the hounds in the lower right, are visibly beautifully preserved. There is a spot of retouching in the valley beyond on the right, another spot in the upper edge and possibly one loss in the neck of the hound in the lower center. The canvas has a good glue lining. The work 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."

Alfred Munnings painted The Huntsman and his Hounds during the autumn of 1910, while breaking from his wandering life to stay briefly at his family home in Mendham, Norfolk.  He had been tempted back to Mendham by the opportunity to work with his favored models, Charlotte and Nobby Gray; and nearly forty years later, Munnings remembered the picture fondly, along with the "wise old tinker" who had posed for him in a scarlet coat that Munnings had purchased for "a fiver" from a rider retired from the hunt. 

Munnings had begun to paint hunting scenes within a year or two of taking up brushes, some seven or eight years earlier; but it was only in 1910-11 in paintings such as The Huntsman and his Hounds and a larger group of hunt pictures created the following year in Cornwall that he established his own mark in a field of painting which he would go on to dominate for more than twenty years.  Munnings felt his way slowly into hunting pictures, an especially British art form narrowly defined by long tradition.  His first compositions and color schemes proceeded directly from the popular hunt imagery of the nineteenth century: groups of men and animals, carefully spaced and individually distinguished by strong simple colors, red jackets against blue skies and green woodlands.  As Munnings' command of painting grew, he began to tackle light effects and landscape schemes of much greater naturalism and complexity.  His work on The Huntsman and his Hounds proceeded in concert with his efforts on a series of pictures of ponies fording a river in which the artist looked down upon the horses against the swirling waters and muddy riverbanks (see lot 105).  That experience of balancing the solid forms of horses against the splintered reflections of moving water led Munnings to shape a similarly shallow composition for the present work. Minimizing the sky, Munnings emphasized a whirl of closely interwoven colors and tonal variations around his featured horse and rider.  Perhaps because he was especially confident in his knowledge of the local landscape, Munnings allowed the angled November sun to soften the structure of the rolling woodlands into a riot of ochers, siennas and blue-greens that offers a visual echo to the frenzied movement of the hounds streaming across the foreground.  The present work provided a template for Munnings' subsequent hunt scenes, which won him considerable popular and critical success for his signature blend of local details, exuberant paint handling, and superbly rendered horses.

Munnings's hunstman was posed by Nobby Gray, a local character and one of the artist's frequent models in the years before the First World War.  Gray was "a true philosopher...who could have played the part of parson or lawyer equally well" (Munnings, p. 248). Married to a gypsy woman who also posed for the artist, Gray made mats and baskets, mended boots and soldered kettles, and he provided Munnings a strong connection to his native landscape. The Huntsman and his Hounds held a nostalgic charm for Munnings, who kept it throughout his life and brought it out to inspire him when he sat down to write his biography at the end of the 1940s.