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SIR ALFRED JAMES MUNNINGS | December Morning, Cornwall
Painted circa 1913
Oil on Canvas
20" x 22"/ 51 x 61 cms
Painted during Munnings’s pre-war stay in Cornwall, December Morning is a celebration of the great artist’s skill as a colourist. The first painter to note that a horse’s coat reflects the colour of its surroundings, Munnings masterfully bathes his subject in the blue and orange highlights of the morning. One of the artist’s few works depicting the horse ‘head on’, December Morning shows Munnings’s understanding of light and tone at its very best.
Painted whilst Munnings was living in Cornwall, December Morning, Cornwall depicts a huntsman surrounded by his scampering, eager dogs trotting along the Cornish lanes in the crisp morning sun of a winter’s day.
Munnings lived in Cornwall from 1910 to 1914, first at Newlyn and later in the small village of Lamorna, known for its wonderfully scenic cove. Established as an artist’s colony since the 1880s, the Newlyn School was centred around the art school ran by Stanhope Forbes and his wife Elizabeth at The Meadow which focused on realist subject matter painted en plain air. There Munnings met and became firm friends with other modern British artists, including Laura and Harold Knight, Dod and Ernest Procter and Samuel John ‘Lamorna’ Birch as well as his first wife Florence, whose life ended in tragic suicide.
Munnings was struck by the beauty of the landscape in Cornwall. It was here that Munnings painted some of his finest landscapes. Concentrating on landscapes of the interior of the Cornish landscape rather than the more popular coast, Munnings continued to paint his favoured subjects of horses and hunting scenes, exploring the motif of a single majestic huntsman.
Throughout Munnings' Cornwall years he chose to depict his groom Ned, a local Cornish youth, atop his favoured grey mare. Of his model, Munnings wrote; ‘Ned has now become a useful groom, and had the right-coloured face and figure for a scarlet coat and black cap. Often did the patient fellow sit as model for me, and he liked it. I painted…. Using his and the horses placed where I wanted them – in a pinewood, on a moor, by a wall. Such backgrounds made compositions and gave the will to work.’
December Morning, Cornwall is one of only a handful of known works depicting the horse and rider ‘head on’ in Munnings oeuvre. Munnings may well have experimented with this more complex compositional approach in response to seeing Lucy Kemp Welch's masterpiece Colt Hunting in the New Forest (Tate Britain), which was painted and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1897. Munnings had first approached this subject in 1906 in his pivotal work A Huntsman and his Hounds (Gladwell & Patterson, London) which exudes energy with the lively foxhounds and their patchwork variety of brown, white and black markings scampering at the feet of the red coated rider as they all move through a loosely depicted woodland.
In 1913 Munnings revisited the depiction of the horse from the front in Hunting Morning (The Munnings Art Museum, Dedham), Going to the Meet (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne) and the present work. The forward movement of the horse and rider in each of these works greatly animates the scene and brings the viewer into the very midst of the chase.
Munnings captures the limitless rolling landscape of the area around Zennor in December Morning, Cornwall. The distant sea is visible upon the horizon and the deep, tree-lined valleys are painted in bold blocks of colour, while the horse and rider are lit up in the crisp, bright morning light. An active member of the Western Foxhounds at Zennor, this exquisite painting represents Munnings passion for riding, the hunt and also the beauty of the windswept Cornish landscape.
Celebrated as a great colourist, Munnings preferred painting outdoors in natural light, even on the coldest of days, only later working up his studies in the studio. Painting with a quick technique, Munnings applied his paint in sure, thick strokes achieving a densely textured surface, thus enlivening the scene despite the monochromatic palette of the English countryside. Munnings was the first painter to note that the coat of a living horse reflects the colours of the sky and its surroundings and it was this technique combined with the vigour of Munnings’ rich impasto brushwork that marks him out as the greatest equestrian artist of the twentieth century.
