Sir Alfred James Munnings, P.R.A., R.W.S., (British, 1878-1959)

Springtime - Polly Scotchmer of the Red Lion Inn, Mendham 16 1/2 x 22 1/2in (42 x 57.2cm)

Springtime - Polly Scotchmer of the Red Lion Inn, Mendham
signed and dated 'A J. Munnings. 1906' (lower left)
oil on canvas
16 1/2 x 22 1/2in (42 x 57.2cm)

Provenance
with Frost & Reed, London;
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

This was one of the pictures that Munnings painted after his apprenticeship at the Norwich firm of lithographers, Page Bros. He had returned home after six years but that summer he was blinded in one eye while helping a puppy through a thicket. For the next few years, Munnings painted scenes around his native village of Mendham, focusing on local rustics performing ordinary everyday activities.

Artists such as George Clausen, Henry LaThangue and other British naturalist painters had created an entire genus portraying people in their natural environment involved in ordinary chores. In the present work, Munnings has selected Polly Scotchmer, a local villager who was the daughter of the landlord of the Red Lion Inn in Mendham. She appears in various works at the time such as A Gala Day (Harris Museum, Preston, England). Polly walks a scruffy pony along a path, doing the mundane task of either collecting or returning it from a field. As she is tidily dressed in her fashionable hat, neck scarf and earrings, perhaps she needs or has needed the pony to pull a cart to go to market. Her apron protects her dress from being soiled.

The predominance of earth tones and the plodding nature of the pony reinforce the rusticity of the scene yet Munnings has enlivened the canvas with patches of white: Polly's apron, the perfusion of tiny flowers in the grass beside the path, and the distant buildings glimpsed through the trees. Despite the ordinariness of the task, Munnings has captured the beauty of the light that floods the scene. By painting en plein air, he has captured the beauty of light. Sunshine bathes the scene, sparkling off all the elements.

We are grateful to Lorian Peralta-Ramos for providing this catalogue note. The work will be included in her upcoming catalogue raisonné on the artist.