Sir Alfred James Munnings, P.R.A., R.W.S.

Mr and Mrs Walter M. Jeffords, Glen Riddle, Pennsylvania, by 1953

Their sale: Sotheby’s, New York, 28 October 2004, lot 179

Purchased after the above sale by the present owner

Palm Beach, Florida, The Society of the Four Arts; Coral Gables, Florida, Lowe Gallery, University of Miami, Racing, 1953-54, no. 34

Sir Alfred Munnings, The Second Burst, 1951, mentioned opposite p. 112 and p. 117

Sun Chariot was one of the most celebrated fillies of the Twentieth Century. Leased by the National Stud to King George VI, she won the Fillies' Triple Crown in 1942 and shortly afterwards Munnings was commissioned to paint her by the King who wanted to make a gift of the painting to his trainer, Fred Darling (1884-1953). It would be Munnings’ last commission to paint a race-horse, as he recalled a few years later; ‘This is September 1949. I have long given up painting other people’s horses. It is too perplexing. Would that I could give up the gout too! In 1940 I painted horses in this peaceful spot in Wiltshire… Since then, with the exception of the King’s mare, Sun Chariot, I have not painted a racehorse.’ (Sir Alfred Munnings, The Finish, 1952, p. 191) The finished painting, for which the present picture is a highly-finished study, measures 30 by 40 inches and is in the collection of the Jockey Club.

In the second volume of his entertaining autobiography Munnings explained how the picture was painted; ‘… at the end of the season before the mare went to stud. A letter came when I was on Exmoor in October 1943. There was no saying “No”.’ Writing some years later Munnings seems to have mis-recalled the year as the present sketch is inscribed ‘Nov. 1942’. Not wanting to delay the Royal commission, Munnings immediately left Devon; ‘… what a fight to get into the train at Dunster! A worse struggle to get in at Taunton on that war-time journey. Who wants to paint race-horses? Imagine me with canvases tied together, suit-case, easel, box. No s ingle porter cared if a man dropped dead on the platform. Every corridor of first- and third-class carriages packed like sardines in a tin’ a nightmare!!' Despite the uncomfortable journey, Munnings was pleased to have new painting-grounds; ‘It was refreshing to get back on the Wiltshire Downs again. After the bleak, rain-drenched hills of Exmoor, Beckhampton Downs with the Calne monument in the distance, Silbury Hill near by, and the great Sarsen Stones standing about, struck a different note. Here was a kinder country. Downs with long lines and different herbage.’ For all his enthusiasm to be on the Wiltshire Downs again, Munnings was reminded that he was not painting in peace-time; ‘But, for all that, the noise of aeroplanes overhead was, at times deafening.’ At Beckhampton, Munnings was shown the horse he had been commissioned to paint; ‘Sun Chariot – a brown mare – already had a long, thick autumn coat… Sun Chariot was a good-looking mare, with rather a mulish head; slightly lop-eared.’ Munnings looked for a suitable place to paint the fine animal; ‘Adjoining the house where Fred Darling lived were large barns and farm buildings with whitewashed walls: far better for the artist than any racing-stable yard. After preliminary studies, one of my final pictures was of the mare with a boy holding her alongside the whitewashed walls of the barn, with its large, buff-coloured doors.’ The stable-boy became integral to the composition; ‘Her lad, like others who had held racehorses that I painted, interested me. He said: “This job is no use; it doesn’t get you anywhere. I’m going into the Navy the week after next.” Taking a liking to the lad, and knowing the King was going to give this picture to the trainer, I determined to show that if I couldn’t paint a horse, I could paint a human being. But it would take a lot to move Fred Darling; a Rembrandt wouldn’t surprise him.’ At first Munnings tried to paint inside a barn as the weather was too inclement to paint outdoors but as the sun came out he realised that a more successful picture could be painted in the brilliant light; ‘The weather changed; the sun shone. The low sunlight threw shadows of the lad and the mare on the barn wall, making the picture. Nothing is so fascinating as the low light of the October sun. An artist’s delight! As I painted the shadowed profile of the lad against the white barn wall I pictured him in a different costume, and wondered how he would like it in the Navy; what would happen to him. These thoughts were dispelled as I concentrated on the clothes he was wearing, his jodhpurs and shiny brown boots.’ (Sir Alfred Munnings, The Second Burst, 1951, pp. 117-118)