History

About the Munnings Art Museum

The Munnings Art Museum is the only museum devoted to Past President of the Royal Academy and proponent of traditional values in painting and drawing Sir Alfred Munnings. Housed in the artist’s former Grade II listed home in rural East Anglia the museum presents the largest rotating permanent retrospective of his work alongside changing special exhibitions and an events programme.

Foundation and Development of the Museum

Sir Alfred Munnings bought Castle House and its surrounding fields in 1919, aged 40. The following year he married Violet McBride and they lived at Castle House for 40 years until he died in 1959. Munnings was a philanthropic man and had already donated a sum of money to help buy Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury for the nation during the 1950s. Munnings had no children it was his wish to leave Castle House to the public. The museum was therefore established in 1961 by Violet Munnings when she created a registered charity, Castle House Trust, to operate a museum in his name. Later, in 1966, Violet gave Castle House, its land and contents to Castle House Trust and its Trustees.

Violet died in 1971 and the Trustees continued to develop the museum by buying a number of significant paintings by Munnings in the 1970s and 1980s to add to an already large collection. Renovation work was done on Castle House which created additional gallery spaces and the museum celebrated Munnings centenary in style in 1978.

In 2013, due to the introduction of the Artist Resale Right, the museum gained an additional income stream which enabled the Trustees to appoint the museum’s first professional Director. Since that time the museum has developed research, exhibition and publication programmes and well as an active programme of creative events.

Our Team

The museum has a small number of dedicated staff looking after the museum and its estate, the collection and engaging with audiences but a large part of what it delivers is due to the unwaivering committment of a 70 strong volunteer cohort. If you would like to donate your time to the museum then please enquire here >

Governance

Oversight of the museum today lies with a board of Trustees. They are responsible for the strategic development of the museum and work to safeguard it for the future.

The Trustees are:
James Johnston (Chairman)
Mike Parker
Ann Tolhurst
Charles Aldous
Bryony Maynard
Vanessa Watson
Hugo Parker

In the 2010s, as the value of the museum’s collection grew and the scope of the museum’s activities increased the trustees decided that the unincorporated structure founded by Violet Munnings was no longer suitable and that the charity would be better served through incorporation. With the agreement of the Charity Commission a new charity was incorporated, also called The Castle House Trust. The incorporated charity took over the activities of the museum at the start of 2022 and in February 2023 the Charity Commission agreed to link the old charity to the new.

As a consequence of the linking, the unincorporated charity’s financial returns to the Charity Commission are no longer available through the charity register. The first set of substantive accounts for the incorporated charity will cover the year to December 2022 and will be published later in 2023. In the absence of earlier accounts on the charity register we thought it might be helpful to provide links to financial accounts which had been available prior to the linking of the charities.
Castle House Trust (1161304-1 formerly 310671)

Year to December 2021 >
Year to December 2020 >

Munnings came to look at Castle House in the summer of 1919 with a party of friends. He wrote:
“I had indeed found my dream house, river and all … it was a big house for one man.” He was persuaded by a friend to make an offer of £1,800 which was accepted: “Still full of fears, I began to wish I had never thought of buying such a thing as a gentleman’s residence. I should never be able to keep such a place! Who was I?”
Violet McBride was an accomplished horsewoman, known in the best circles, and Munnings met her in 1919. She caught the his attention: “Here was a subject to paint – a good looking woman on horseback, silk hat and gardenia – all complete.” He asked if she would sit for him. Initially she declined but finally she was persuaded. Violet first visited Castle House in the winter of 1919 to celebrate Christmas along with other friends of Munnings including Laura and Harold Knight.

Following their wedding in March 1920 Violet undertook all the domestic elements of Munnings’ life including the accounts and organisation of the household. Violet also contrived many of his commissions during the 1920s and 1930s some of which she secured from her contacts in the horse and hunting world. She saw it as her role to release him from the mundane activities of everyday life so that he had the freedom to carry out his work uninhibited.

He wrote “I have been more than blessed with a good wife.”
She said “he was never such a good painter after he married me.”

Prior to his death in 1959, Munnings and Violet had discussed making his paintings more accessible to the public and so, with enormous support from the public, it was she who opened Castle House as a museum in his memory in the spring of 1961. In an interview with The Daily Mail in 1961 she said that “I feel that his spirit is still here.” In 1966 the Castle House Trust was founded to manage and maintain The Sir Alfred Munnings Art Museum. Lady Munnings and the Trustees acquired further paintings in order to show a more fully representative body of Munnings’ work. Lady Munnings died in 1971, having moved to Chelsea in the late 1960s but the Trust continues to run the museum today.

“Castle House. Castle Hill. Late fifteenth century Front Range, and south range added in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, all timber framed and plastered. Early nineteenth century additions on the north side, rendered brick, including the drawing room. A circular room with domed ceiling was formed in the existing south range. Some later nineteenth century decoration including moulding and gothic detailing in the staircase hall.” (Pevsner; The Buildings of England: Essex).

In the fourteenth century Castle House was one of the prominent clothier residences in Dedham, where weaving was the predominant industry. Woollen cloths were sold primarily at the Flemish Markets and also at Dedham market once it was established. The industry peaked in the fifteenth century enabling merchant weavers to fund the building of Dedham church.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the English Civil War and the closure of the Flemish Markets caused the weaving industry to decline but there were forty known clothiers in Dedham operating from the sixteenth century onwards, including a number based at Castle House.
At the turn of the eighteenth century the cloth trade in this part of the country was again on the up but had relocated to portside towns leaving Dedham in a state of poverty. Huguenots fleeing France sought refuge in Britain and brought with them the skills to weave silk. Silk cloths were worth much more than wool and so Dedham once again became prosperous. This new found wealth enabled the local inhabitants to modernise and make fashionable their houses, bringing them into the Georgian age. This included the extension and remodelling of Castle House.

The Dedham silk weaving industry declined throughout the nineteenth century largely due to its geographical position with the port towns, again, proving to be much more efficient trading centres.