Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959)
Four autograph letters (three signed) by Alfred Munnings to Paul Konody and Dame Laura Knight, n.d. (the letters to Konody 6 February to late March 1918)
23 pages, various sizes, the letter to Laura Knight illustrated throughout with comic marginalia; [with] an autograph letter signed by John Richardson, n.d. and an autograph letter in the third person by Copley Fielding, 8 April 1850. Provenance: Sotheby's, 25 July 1978, lot 292, and Roy Davids Limited, 25 May 1998.

‘Confound all people who make water colors. Confound all makers of water color paper. Confound all dam’d color what pull up when you want to wash over them. Confound all dam’d colors what go black & sad & dull and Confound all things to do with the bally medium whatever’. Munnings writing to Knight complaining about his frustrations over a picture ‘am keeping it until May when I’ll go at it again when there’s no rotten R.A. to think of’ and discussing his work with watercolour, ‘Perhaps one little bright thing done in a morning to save myself from utter damnation was as good as any. I slogged too on an artificial, little, fictional thing of a Postillion & grey horses, and carriage with Victorian ladies suggested – to confound many things as Jorrocks did I should go on in this way’. The letter is illustrated extensively with depictions of Munnings throwing away his watercolour box in disgust and kicking a canvas, alongside a full page depicting scenes from the hunt. The three letters to Konody describe his time capturing scenes from the front, ‘I was quickly made a captain and given a tin hat’, continuing ‘I love France...I stand up on the high chalk cliffs & look over that peaceful valley’. The letter from Richardson confirms a meeting the following day and Copley Fielding offers to show pictures 'which he has finished for the Exhibition'.

Munnings was commissioned by Konody to go with a group of artists to France to illustrate scenes of Canada’s war effort. He was attached to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade under the command of General Seely, later Lord Mottistone and sent to the Brigade’s headquarters in Northern France, on the front line near the Omignon River. Although Munnings was not intended to join the front line, he remained here to paint the horses in action until the German offensive of March-April 1918. The paintings of the Canadian Army by the commissioned artists were exhibited at Burlington House in January 1919, and Munnings contributed forty-five of the three hundred and fifty paintings shown.

Please note that this lot comprises four autograph letters (three signed) by Munnings, and not five as originally stated.