‘It's marvellous Mr Munnings!'

As recently published letters from Munnings to his second wife shine a light on the artist’s often demanding aristocratic subjects, Madeleine Silver discovers why his paintings still have the ultimate allure for horse lovers

- Madeleine Silver

“THESE riding women imagine they look entirely different to what they are,” wrote the equestrian artist Sir Alfred Munnings to his second wife Violet McBride in 1921.

It was a seemingly arduous commission to paint the Duchess of Westminster at her country house Eaton Hall that prompted the outburst, revealed in a published collection of letters from 100 years ago, entitled Yours with Love, AJ.

“Very sick of this job... Thank heavens the D [Duchess] is going off tomorrow. She is anxious over the picture – first she want the mane blowing & then laid down – & she really believes she teaching me how to paint a horse with a lady a top,” Munnings wrote, going on to lament the Duchess’ demands to have her breasts and feet reduced in size in the painting.

“‘I think it’s marvellous Mr Munnings!!’ [she said] – (all because she looks tall slim & graceful as no woman ever did look on a horse!) [sic],” he added.

Before the outbreak of World War I, the plain-speaking Munnings – who was blind in one eye – was well respected for his equestrian paintings, but it was his war paintings for the Canadian Cavalry Brigade and the Canadian Forestry Corps, exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1919, that changed his fortunes. Aristocrats scrambled to book him to capture them aboard their finest mounts, with Munnings touring the country to meet their demands. And a century later, his work hasn’t lost its spellbinding appeal.