Description:

Oil on canvas Signed. Provenance: Private collection, New Jersey Sotheby's New York, June 9, 1989, no. 372 Artis Group Ltd., New York Private collection, Minneapolis, Minnesota Exhibited: Hillstrom Museum of Art, Animal and Sporting Paintings in the Penkhus Collection: The Very English Ambience of it All, Saint Peter, Minnesota, September 12 - November 6, 2016, illustrated on page 18. Gibbes Museum, Charleston Collects: British Sporting Art from the Penkhus Collection, Charleston, South Carolina, February 7, 2020 - October 4, 2020. Literature: Turner Reuter Jr., "Sporting Art-Thoroughly Modern Munnings," Spur Magazine, July/August 1991, page 89. During the first decade of the 20th century, there was a renewed national interest in English rural life and its native people. This "back to the land" movement had begun by the end of the 1880s and continued through the Edwardian era. Various societies and magazines such as Country Life were established during this period to broaden the awareness of the British countryside. Rural genre scenes were commonplace in the Royal Academy exhibitions at the time and were highly collected and desirable pictures. The subject matter was a natural fit for Munnings, who was well equipped to produce such imagery as he frequently traveled the English countryside on painting expeditions. The current work depicts a young herdsman in Mendham, not far from the artist's Suffolk home at Castle House, Dedham. Emerging from the foliage in a moment of rest, the boy appears indistinguishable from the land, the earthen color of his jacket and trousers suggesting the intrinsic relationship between the land and its agrarian workers. There are many bovine subjects in Munnings' oeuvre, but brown and white cows featured in his works as early as 1902. And though the title of the painting describes the farmhand, the cow is the true subject of the work. Encircled with incidental elements such as the form of the farmhand and the light shades of color parallel to the bovine's back, the cow emerges dramatically from the canvas. Munnings has laid down bright patches on brilliant white on her back, and sensitively highlighted the tip of the ear and horn. The care taken with these select strokes contrasts greatly with the fluidity of the surrounding brushwork and suggest the sensitivity with which he treated his bovine subject. Painted in 1910, this work is characteristic of Munnings' early experimentation within the Impressionist tradition and exhibits the expressive and loose brushstrokes favored by the artist in his early career. Despite being remembered as one of the finest equestrian artists of all time, Munnings proclaimed in his memoirs that cows were a superior subject to paint. In fact, Munnings was so fond of painting cattle the he purchased his own to model for pictures between 1911-14. Sir Alfred James Munnings (British, 1878-1959) One of the two great masters of sporting art along with George Stubbs, Munnings began as an illustrator after attending art school in Norwich. A keen sportsman, he hunted with both stag hounds and harriers, drawing and painting these events. Although he lost sight in one eye at age 21, his unique artistic vision and interpretation were unimpaired. Working in oils and watercolors and sketching wherever he went, Munnings documented racing and hunting horses, gypsies, and the sporting country life that he himself lived.

  • Dimensions: 28 " x 36 "

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November 18, 2023 12:00 PM EST
Lexington, KY, US

Cross Gate Gallery

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