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

Leicester Galleries, London
Private Collection (acquired from the above, November, 1947)
Thence by descent (and sold, Christie's, London, May 20, 2005, lot 115, illustrated)
Richard Green, London
Acquired from the above 

London, Leicester Galleries, "The English scene": horses, racing, landscapes, and studies by Sir Alfred James Munnings P.R.A., October-November 1947, no. 50 (as Stable Lad and Horse)

The following condition report was kindly provided by Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.: This work is clearly in lovely condition. It is still on its original stretcher. The paint layer is clean. The varnish is quite dull, but the work looks very well. A light coat of varnish may add some more depth to the work. No retouches are visible under ultraviolet light, except for a spot or two in the lower center edge.
"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."

In 1947, Cherrybounce and a Stable Boy was included in Leicester Galleries’ expansive exhibition of Sir Alfred Munnings’ work (as were lots 58, 64, 66 and 67). The show yielded the highest return rates of the artist’s career (more than £27,000), with sales totaling £12,000 in the first day alone, a far distance from the £20 to £60 paid for works included in his first one-man show of 1913 (Reginald Pound, The Englishman, A Biography of Sir Alfred Munnings, London, 1962, p. 167).  While the exhibition was promoted as a celebration of the “English Scene,” works like Cherrybounce and a Stable Boy, also established his prominent place in the very “modern” art world. Sir Demond MacCarthy, literary critic of the Sunday Times, found the popularity of the exhibition invigorating, writing to Munnings that “it means…  two things.  First, that at last lovers of pictures are asserting their faith that painting is a representative art, a principle which no one doubted till lately, and, secondly, that they are beginning to kick against the capture by the theoretical cliques of all the main channels of art critics, who scare and hypnotize people with incomprehensible jargon… If your name had been Degas, how the ‘critics’ would have raved about your skill in recording movement and the gait and gestures of horses” (correspondence dated November 26, 1947 as quoted in Pound, p. 167).  MacCarthy’s assessment points to the innovative, daring technique that yielded works like Cherrybounce and a Stable Boy, often too easily dismissed as conventional sporting art.  Munnings himself explained that “art writers, their minds, urbanized, jeer at my ‘shiny horses,’ as they call them. They are welcome to their Matisse women, to their Braques, to their Modiglianis and surrealist horses… There is a certain depth and transparency in the well-groomed coat of a horse…. On browns the lights are cooler, greyer, bluer, if you like; on a bay, less cool; on a chestnut, inclining to pinkey-grey.  On a well-grown horse in the sun these lights are devastating” (Sir Alfred Munnings, The Finish, London, 1952, p. 42).  The horse of the present work is not presented simply as a brown bay, but is built of an ingenious blending of variegated tones—peaches, tans, yellows, and blacks— which, together, create an authentic representation of the equine form, one the artist knew well and much loved. Indeed, the “model” for the present work has been identified as Cherrybounce, the artist’s favorite bay.  Cherrybounce appears in a number of Munnings’ works of the late 1930s and 1940s including one of his most famous compositions Why weren’t you out yesterday (1938, sold in these rooms, December 1, 1988, lot 7) and Winter Exercise, also exhibited at the Leicester Galleries.  Described by the artist as “a 16.1 bay mare bred by myself,” Cherrybounce, “Cherry for short” was named after a horse in Robert Smith Surtees’ Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour (1853) a comic novel the artist loved (Munnings, p. 74).  After capturing her so evocatively in paint, in 1942  the artist wrote an entire ballad in Cherrybounce’s honor:

“And so through gates by Kington Farm
I ambled off upon a mare,
A bay, which I called “Cherrybounce”.
I ride her with the greatest care.

Unlike the other ones I’ve bred,
When she grew up she used to shy
And snort and stare at things ahead;
I had to always keep an eye.

Upon these nervous, pricked up ears.
Her many virtues I exalt.
Remembering all the gates she clears
I willingly forgive a fault.

(Munnings, p. 344)

Beyond Cherrybounce, the blond stable lad was also well known to the artist.  He is one of the three Delaney brothers who were taken under the wing of Munnings and Lady Munnings in the 1940s.  While the eldest brother served most often as model each were happy to pose given the artist's generosity in providing care and shelter.