Sir Alfred Munnings (1878–1959) did himself a grave and lasting disservice when he publicly attacked modern art in a bibulous after-dinner speech at the Royal Academy in 1949. He had been president of the RA for five years, pipping Augustus John to the post, but the controversy he stirred up (he called Picasso and Matisse ‘foolish daubers’) led to his resignation. The echoes of his rant linger on more than half-a-century later, constituting for many the most memorable thing about him. Like Canute, Munnings could not stem the tide, and Modernism for a time swamped and eroded his reputation. Now, as people begin to look at his work again, his real genius as a painter in a post-Impressionist mode — but ineradicably of the British Romantic tradition — is re-emerging.
One of the things that has served to redirect the spotlight on to him is an enjoyable new film called Summer in February, based on the excellent novel of that name by Jonathan Smith. This focuses on the period just before the first world war when Munnings lived in Cornwall and was part of the Newlyn School, painting with such talented friends and colleagues as Laura Knight and Lamorna Birch.
The film is as much a complicated love story as it is the portrait of a young artist, and recounts Munnings’s first, and tragically short-lived, marriage. In 1912, he married Florence Carter-Wood, who killed herself two years later. Munnings never referred to this episode, and Florence is not mentioned in any of his three volumes of autobiography. He married again in 1920, choosing this time Violet McBride, the daughter of a London riding master and herself an exceptional horsewoman, and they settled at Castle House in Essex.
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