THIS IS OUR KNIGHT

The son of a miller and the grandson of a farmer, Alfred Munnings drew boats and ponies as a boy.

When fourteen a family friend urged his father to apprentice him to a lighographic firm, Page Brothers. For the next six years he worked ten-hour days and attended the Norwich School of Art at night. He studied watercolor, the art of John Constable, John Crome, John Sell Cotman, and most of all the animal art of George Stubbs and Ben Marshall.

While working at Page Brothers his work was seen by a key account, the director John Shaw Tomkins of A.J. Caley & Son, Chocolate Manufacturers. Munnings started designing Caley's posters, chocolate-box tops and advertisements.

During this time with Caley & Son, Tomkins commissioned Munnings to do a portrait of his father. This was to be the first of many portraits to be commissioned (with or without that persons horse).

In 1899 at the age of twenty-one, Munnings had two works accepted for exihibition at the Royal Academy in London.

At some point he stopped work as a lithographer and ventured out as a painter purchasing a carpenter's shop that he turned into a studio. Shortly after this he was lifting a dog over a hedge, got a briar caught in his right eye thus blinding it!

This did not in any way deter him from painting. And twice he went to Paris to study at Julien's atelier.

Munnings bought what he called "the house of my dreams" after serving in World War I as an official war artist for the Canadian Cavalry Brigade in France. This house constructed in the fourteenth century as an L-shaped timber-frame building had an addition in the eighteenth of Georgian rooms, including a bowed drawing room plus second-floor bedrooms. The restored house is now a museum with a number of of his works on view to the public, along with many of Munnings's furnishings and personal objects. One of the paintings to be found hung on the walls is of his second wife, Violet McBride who the artist married in 1920, PORTRAIT OF LADY MUNNINGS RIDING A BAYHUNTER.

In 1944 Munnings was voted to the position of President of the Royal Academy. He earned gold medals at Paris Salons and exhibited much of his work to great success. He held the presidental post for five years and was knighted, and in 1947 he was appointed Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order.


However, it should be known that many, may have not ever heard of or seen the works of Sir Alfred James Munnings unless they have a love for horses and/or racing. This is due to his antagonizing the art establishments members with his violent stand against modernism and artists like Matisse. And as of April 1995, no Royal Academy president had ever visited the museum during its few hours of opening each summer. (If a president has since then we are not aware of it but would like to ammend this.)