Sir Alfred James Munnings, KCVO Kt PRA RI is known as having been one of England’s finest painters of horses. He was an outspoken critic of Modernism. Engaged by Lord Beaverbrook’s Canadian War Memorials Fund after the Great War, he earned several prestigious commissions throughout his career.

Sir Alfred James Munnings was born during 1878 in Mendham, Suffolk. Alfred Munnings was the son of a miller.  He was apprenticed to a firm of lithographers from 1893 to 1898 and studied at the Norwich School of Art and in Paris. It was here when he became impressed with plein-air naturalism; this, together with his introduction to the racecourse in 1899, here began the start to his famous compositions.

When the First World War broke out, Munnings, like many, enlisted to help his country. Despite, having the use of only one eye following an accident in 1899.  When working in the army, he became a horse trainer for the cavalry horses. The training commenced near Reading. Further on in his time with the army, he went to France as an official war artist, attached to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade.

The year 1919 was a major turning-point in all aspects of Munnings’s life; he painted his first racehorse, Poethlyn, the winner of the Grand National, and became an Associate of the Royal Academy.  He met Violet McBride, whom he was to marry, and bought Castle House, Dedham, where the Munnings Memorial Trust maintains a permanent exhibition of his pictures. Munnings’s prolific career, spanning over sixty years, brought him honour, with election to the Presidency of the Royal Academy in 1944, a Knighthood in 1945, and a personal award from the Sovereign in 1947, when he was created Knight of the Royal Victorian Order.