The Munnings Art Museum

HRH The Princess Royal visited the acclaimed
Behind the Lines: Alfred Munnings, War Artist, 1918 at the Munnings Art Museum on Monday 23 September 2019.

 

 

 

 

 

After touring the exhibition with Museum Director Jenny Hand – which included meeting renowned horse racing journalist, broadcaster and former jockey, Brough Scott, whose grandfather, Brigadier-General ‘Galloper’ Jack Seely enjoyed a decades-long friendship with Alfred Munnings that was forged on the Western Front, and whose portrait is in the exhibition – she explored the rest of the Museum, including the artist’s studio, and signed the Visitors Book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During her visit HRH The Princess Royal met exhibition curators Brenda Parrish and Charles Proudfoot, along with Trustees of the Museum, and three of the seventy-five volunteer room stewards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HRH The Princess Royal was accompanied by Her Majesty’s Lord Lieutenant of Essex, Jennifer Tolhurst and met a number of notable Essex guests during her visit. These included the High Sheriff of Essex, Dr James Bettley, Harwich and North Essex MP Sir Bernard Jenkin, Essex Chief Constable Ben-Julian Harrington, Essex County Council Chairman Cllr John Jowers and the Mayor of Colchester Cllr Nicholas Cope.

Museum Director Jenny Hand said “We felt extremely privileged to have the princess royal visit today. It affirms the museum’s rising profile as a significant centre for the appreciation of the work of Sir Alfred Munnings.”

10th July 2019

Under a marbled blue and grey sky, with horses at ease in the fields of Castle House, an attentive audience of eighty listened keenly to racing commentator Brough Scott tell the story of his grandfather Jack Seely and his horse Warrior; and of the artist who immortalised them both in 1918: Alfred Munnings.

The talk reminded us of the reach, and the breadth and the depth of Munnings’ life; of his work and of his connections. It suggested the fascinations we have not only with the artist himself but also with his family, his circle of friends and associates and the broader social forces pushing and pulling away in the background across a life that spanned eighty years. It also made us aware of the fact that the First World War is a conflict that is beginning to slip just around the corner of memory as the generations roll by.

Certainly, bringing the lens of another visiting speaker to Castle House has vividly contributed yet another dimension to our appreciation and examination of Munnings’ life but also to our understandings of the times in which he lived. The past is always echoing in the present. “Munnings has been full of myths and otherwise” observed Brough Scott early in his captivating talk and in this description he made the connection to Munnings’ longstanding and valued friendship with Jack Seely.

In the painting Major General The Right Honourable J. E. B. Seely (currently on display here at Castle House in our exhibition Behind The Lines) Munnings evoked the strength and endurance of the relationship between Seely and Warrior. Indeed, Brough took us quite movingly right through Warrior’s life, placing it in the context of the painting and in the story that continued far beyond it.

Brough deftly wove together humour, anecdote, family history, wider social history and an affecting sense of resonance. In sketching out something of Seely’s character, Brough noted that Seely was perhaps fearless rather than brave. Indeed, this distinction became acute when Brough noted that the portrait was undertaken just a mile from the front line in January 1918. For all of the steadfastness evoked by the image that Munnings painted, Brough also drew our attention to a sense of melancholy in both Warrior and Seely who had endured together almost four years of fighting.

A little later in the evening, as Brough took in the Behind the Lines exhibition,
he noted that the painting Horses of the 36^th Company was suffused with that same melancholy feeling. He also made a keen connection between the rawness of Munnings’ pre-war paintings of gypsies in East Anglia and the rawness inherent in his paintings of men and horses at war.

For all of the specifics of time and place that Brough vividly conjured, perhaps the most powerful aspect of the talk, the part that resonated most, was that it told a story about the mutual sensitivity between humans and horses and how this in turn manifests itself in a powerful sense of devotion. Seely recognised this powerful connection and Munnings did, too. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to suggest that this devotional spirit towards the horse is what emanates from so many of Munnings’ paintings.

Towards the end of the event one of the longstanding stewards at Castle House shared a memory that had been prompted by the talk. A lifelong local resident, he recalled his father’s memory of how farmers at Ardleigh railway station had cried as they watched their farm horses loaded onto the trains to be taken far from home to the battlefields of France. “They were saying goodbye to their friends, weren’t they?” the steward asserted.

 

Thoughts on the opening of a new exhibition “Behind the Lines, Alfred Munnings, War Artist, 1918”
March 21st 2019

When The Honourable Patrick Seely cut the red ribbon to open the new Munnings Art Museum exhibition
Behind the Lines, Alfred Munnings, War Artist, 1918, there was a tangible excitement amongst the invited guests as they walked at a pace to get into the galleries and be the first to see the elegant arrangement of 41 evocative paintings of the Canadian Cavalry and Forestry Corps in France in 1918 by Alfred Munnings. The private view represented the culmination of a several-years’ long effort to bring the exhibition to The Munnings Art Museum in Dedham and to see the paintings, which are on loan from the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, displayed in their shimmering gold frames, set against the smoke-grey gallery walls has marked a milestone in the life of the museum.

The profound, lifelong affection that Munnings had for horses imbues so many of the pictures in the exhibition but there is affection, too, in the detail of soldiers taking a moment of quiet between combat. One of the most striking of these paintings depicts a soldier sitting atop a stack of felled timber under an azure sky. It’s an image that celebrates the beauty of the moment and perhaps only serves to heighten the tragedy of the war that is there just beyond the frame of the painting.

Enriching the pictures on display in this once-in-a-generation return of the paintings to the museum at Castle House, Alfred Munnings home for 40 years, are a fascinating selection of his sketches that are permanently housed in The Munnings Art Museum’s own collection. There are loosely worked sketches of soldiers relaxed in repose and delicate, but highly detailed, renderings of the faces in the places through which the soldiers moved.

History and memory are connected by quite different ways of seeing the past and in relation to Behind the Lines there’s some value in quoting the American historian David Blight who has usefully made the following observation: “If history is shared and secular, memory is often treated as a sacred set of absolute meanings and stories … Memory is often owned, history interpreted. Memory is passed down through generations; history is revised. Memory often coalesces in objects, sites and monuments; history seeks to understand contexts in all their complexity.”

When Alfred Munnings bought Castle House in 1919, hardly a year after his return from France, he described it affectionately as “the house of my dreams”. For a man who spent significant stretches of time away from home with his work, the house on the edge of Dedham, became Alfred Munnings’ refuge and workplace. How fitting and moving it was, then, at the opening of Behind the Lines, to hear Jim Witham, Acting Director-General of the Canadian War Museum, speak to the resonance of Castle House as Munnings’ creative stronghold. Behind the Lines brings back home a series of paintings that quietly and brilliantly sustain a memory that belongs to us all.

 

 

In the last glow of the fading October daylight, Dedham Assembly Rooms welcomed Martin Bell on October 3rd on the occasion of the Munnings Birthday Lecture. A newly instituted annual event in the calendar of programmes delivered by the Munnings Art Museum in Dedham, Essex, the lecture format is intended to touch on a subject of relevance to the world of the Alfred Munnings.

 

Martin said of his father, Adrian Bell, known for his writing about rural life and for instituting The Times crossword in 1930, that “He was a man with a broad empathy for country ways. A quiet man.” Touchingly, Martin added that “I loved being known as his son.” Of his father’s friendship with Munnings, Martin recalled how “They took a liking to each other. Munnings was a larger than life character. He used to drive around in a chauffeur driven Buick.” Martin’s parents had been living in Stoke by Nayland when they met and befriended Munnings.

 

Critically, Martin’s talk went on to sketch out something of Munnings’ connection to war; in doing so, he anticipated the exhibition of Munnings’ images of the Canadian cavalry in World War 1 that everyone at the museum is so excited to be presenting next year.

Addressing the more sombre aspect and context for some of Munnings’ work, Martin noted that: “You can’t talk about Munnings without thinking about war. All his paintings were done within ‘earshot’ of war. I think Munnings’ work is coloured by war.” Unsurprisingly, and to the great interest of our audience, Martin went on to discuss his own direct relationship with war in terms of his news reporting from Vietnam and Yugoslavia, amongst other warzones. For Martin, Munnings was sensitive to the toll that war took and he acknowledged how Munnings and his work marked “a collision point” with modern art and broader aspects of the modern world…the very world that World War 1 had begun to bring into focus.

 

The beating heart of Martin’s talk was his evident care and concern for Suffolk. Addressing our sold-out, enthralled audience of 120, Martin’s comments and stories ranged across subjects such as war, news broadcasting (including an amusing anecdote about interviewing Margaret Thatcher) and the current state of politics and his frustration with Brexit.

Memories of place and space were key to Martin’s talk and, towards the end of the evening, quoting some of his own poetry, he used the following phrase to describe the Suffolk landscape as a place of “the oldest fields beneath the widest sky”. In these few words Martin could not have more truthfully spoken to the spirit of so many of Munnings’ landscape paintings.

 

The museum’s second Spirit of the Stour plein air painting competition took place over last weekend, Friday 21st to Sunday 23rd September, and was a great success. Artists, both amateur and professional, were attracted once again to the Essex / Suffolk border, on the banks of the river between Dedham, Flatford and Stratford St Mary. A number of the artists travelling from Norfolk, Kent, London and Bedfordshire to participate.

The competition was run in conjunction with the museum’s current special exhibition Munnings and the River which explores a lesser known side to the artist Alfred Munnings, one of Britain’s greatest horse painters (1878-1959).

The exhibition consists of fifty of Munnings’ river landscape paintings and the museum’s
Director, Jenny Hand, encouraged competitors to “take Munnings’ own passion for capturing the beauty of English rivers and their surrounding countryside”, in conveying scenes from banks of the Stour.

With only five hours each day in which to complete their paintings, 36 artists set up their easels in ‘challenging’ weather. They were not deterred and their creative energy and commitment yielded a glorious array of 65 watercolours, oils, gouache, pencil and paintings using egg tempera. These were then displayed for family, friends and the public to view in an exhibition finale on Sunday afternoon.

Judges James Colman, plein air artist and founder of Paint Out, Norwich and Sarah Harris of the Dedham Educational Foundation deliberated over the entries for over an hour. They awarded the £250 Overall prize to Wimbledon Art Studios based artist Andrew Horrod for his painting Reflections by Dedham Mill and the Amateur category prize of £100 to Sarah Allbrook for Dedham Boathouse. Satisfyingly, both pictures were quickly sold to eager art lovers.

 

A selection of the paintings from the competition are on display throughout October in The Munnings Art Museum’s café in the garden (free entry). They are also available to buy so come and enjoy lunch or tea and cake in the café and pick up a piece of the Spirit of the Stour for yourself.

 

Munnings and the River and a further 150 paintings displayed throughout the museum and charting the life and work of Sir Alfred Munnings, continues until Wednesday 31st October 2018, Wednesday to Sunday, 2-5pm.

 

 

 

 

 

It can be very satisfying when things come full circle. There was a bit of this sense of satisfaction in the air around The Munnings Art Museum on July 18^th2018 when Christopher Le Brun, current President of the Royal Academy, was in attendance for a conversation with our Director, Jenny Hand.

 

Under the seemingly watchful gaze of Alfred Munnings, as you can see in our photos from the event, Christopher Le Brun ranged across a wide canvas of ideas and insights. He began by describing his own journey to becoming President of the RA and the ways in which the role demands sensitivity, tact and sense of diplomacy. Christopher then went on to detail the process that the Royal Academy works to in selecting work for exhibition at its Summer Show. Christopher was able to really humanize the process, too, by identifying particular stories about artists who had submitted work that was duly selected. In discussing the RA exhibition, Christopher addressed the ways in which work can be exhibited and he touched on the form of exhibition by ‘theme’. Rather nicely for us here at the museum, Christopher noted that our exhibition Munnings and the River was exemplary as exhibition by theme. A focal point of the early part of the conversation was around legacy in terms of Christopher’s role as President, in terms of the RA itself and in terms of Munnings and it was gratifying to hear Christopher focus so much on Munnings’ achievements as an artist.

 

Jenny also engaged Christopher in a discussion of his own creative practice and the idea of a legacy, in terms of his own work and practice and also in terms of Munnings’ resonance and relevance in his own time and in the decades since. Christopher LeBrun described Munnings as “spectacularly talented”. We already knew this, of course, but it’s nice to hear the President of the RA saying it, too.

The conversation also moved into interesting territory about what art is and what it offers and, by extension, what the relationship is between artist and viewer of their work. Do we need to know what the artist intended ? Is it enough to just have the work to respond to without any sense of creative context for it ? It’s a good question to try and answer and maybe there’s never an answer to arrive at.

 

Satisfyingly , as part of the closing part of the event, when our audience were able to ask questions, Christopher started to dig into what art offers in its most essential ways. Clearly, the conversation with the audience could have run much longer. The comment that Christopher made that hung in the air after the event was over was simply this: that art is “thick with meaning”.

 

Just as it’s satisfying when things come full circle, it’s also satisfying when things echo: as Christopher Le Brun talked about making and showing and responding to art, just  outside, beyond our marquee, in the peace and sanctuary of our front lawn at the house, sat a scattered band of artists from a local art group. These scattered solitary figures with their sketchpads and their paints and pencils, sat with quiet intensity, making their own art.

 

 

An audience of over 40 people gathered in the Munnings Studio on 16^th May to celebrate the voices of ten female poets from Essex and Suffolk. After a short introduction by Museum Director Jenny Hand and Tim Gardiner (the Museum’s Poet-in-Residence for 2018), the first half was hosted by Wivenhoe’s Lelia Ferro who picked four poets to read. Lelia began by reading a poem from her First Site Residency before moving on to estuarine themes (in Mahala) with such wonderfully evocative language (‘moonlit tombstones’ and ‘purple asters’). The Witch of Wivenhoe then took the evening in a different direction.

Next up was another Wivenhoe poet, Alex Toms, a key member of Poetry Wivenhoe and winner of many poetry prizes. The witchy theme continued with The Summerlands about teenage experiences of witchcraft. There were also sensitive poems of transformation (The Poacher’s Daughter). Alex is known for her love of eels and she did not disappoint with The Eel-Catcher Calls Me Home.

Lelia’s next poet, Sarah Bevins, took over the witches’ broom, introducing a pagan feel to proceedings clearly attuned to nature. Some delicate poetry followed, beautifully read by Sarah. Poems such as Beach Spoil (with its ‘café latte shore’) and Plastic Spoon (‘tumours of plastic’) displayed a heart-felt concern for environmental issues.

Judith Wolton, Lelia’s third poet, read a diverse mix of poems concerning swallows, the Old Man of Coniston, crows, painted lady butterflies, fig wasps and finishing rather aptly with And No Birds Sing, a poem aligned to the pioneering environmental work of Rachel Carson.

The first half finished with Carol Webster, who is an academic studying other worldly experiences. Witches featured again along with Wivenhoe Church via Wivenhoe Books and its ‘moth husks.’ Carol finished a quick-fire set with the West Highlands and the ruined clearance villages. This got me thinking of a song (Letter from America) by the Scottish band, The Proclaimers, who opined the exodus of people during the clearances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

After audience and poet were refreshed with food and drink from the café, Felixstowe poet and English teacher, Alex Davis, hosted the second half. Alex kicked off with her own brand of maternal poetry, recalling family walks up Mam Tor and down into Blue John Cavern in the Peak District. An emotional reading of a poem about her nan (Nel) followed. In Titania, she recalled a flowery dress which caused some consternation in a colleague. A very diverse set from Alex set the evening running again.

Alex’s first choice of poet, Rosalynde Price, confidently delivered a series of superb poems: Distance, Puddle, Hive Mind, Stars, Rooks, Fox, and Heifers. Roz is a regular on the East Anglia poetry scene and it was lovely to hear her words.

Award winning poet Pam Job juggled humour and poignancy well and transported us from Water Buffalo in Wivenhoe (with references to Kilimanjaro), to the cherry blossoms of Mount Fuji. Pam also read a poem written during Alex’s Emily Dickinson workshop in Wivenhoe.

Alex’s third choice of poet, Fran Reader, blended the political with the personal, even managing to fit in references to male and female genitalia. Fran opened with a sestina (Object) which was a powerful feminist poem in response to the Me Too Movement. Fran expertly used humour to convey the message of her poetry with good use of form.

Alex’s headline act was award winning Suffolk poet Rebecca Goss. Rebecca’s first poem was about a train journey to a poetry reading and Capri-Sun drinkers. The humour of this poem contrasted with the solemnity of the next, Reverse Call Charges, in which Rebecca imagines what she would tell her younger self of the pain to come in later life. Rebecca then moved seamlessly on to the work of artist, Alison Watt, and the erotic connotation of fabric with the poem To Say Everything Is White. Rebecca finished with Suffolk poems and talked about her forthcoming collection. Blacksmiths and Thatchers are notoriously hard to write poetry about as Rebecca espoused; they’re just too happy!  Rebecca finished an excellent set with two poems: Molly and Pip (about her daughter and their dog) and White Currants.

The poetry evening was a resounding success with standing room only, the audience enjoying some of the finest female poets that East Anglia has to offer. After last September’s well attended poetry evening, the Museum is fast becoming a top venue for poetry in north Essex.