The story
During the First World War, Canadian multi-millionaire press baron Max Aitken (b.1879) made it his mission to document the war effort of his compatriots. He set up the Canadian War Records Office in London, and made certain that news of Canada’s contribution to the war was printed in Canadian and British newspapers.
Aitken also commissioned artists, photographers, and film makers to record life on the Western Front. In 1916 he established the Canadian War Memorials Fund, a charity that commissioned artists to record the war. The Fund ended up employing some 100 artists, resulting in over 800 paintings, prints and sculptures.
One of these was Alfred Munnings. Born in Suffolk in 1878, Munnings had progressed through apprenticeship to a Norwich printer, to Norwich Art School, and then had some of his works selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (1899). Throughout the Edwardian era he made a minor name for himself as a painter of landscapes and horses, especially in Cornwall, where he became associated with the Newlyn School of painters.
When the First World War broke out Munnings volunteered for the army but was rejected due to the (amazing) fact that he was blind in one eye, having managed to damage it in a bramble bush aged 20.
In 1917, his participation in the war was limited to a civilian job outside Reading processing tens of thousands of Canadian horses en route to France. Later that year he was assigned to one of the horse remount depots on the Western Front.
It was at this point that he was contacted by the Canadian War Memorials Fund and commissioned to record the activities of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. He made numerous paintings of officers and men on horseback, marching, training, resting, watering the horses. All of this was well behind the lines for Munnings never saw any kind of action. Only one of the paintings in this exhibition shows the cavalry in combat, mounting a charge, and this was an imaginative reconstruction of a charge he didn’t witness.
On the basis of his popularity with the cavalry, Munnings was then invited by the Canadian Forestry Corps to tour their work camps, and he produced drawings, watercolors and paintings showing draft horses and men involved in the arduous work of chopping down trees, shaping and hewing them and piling them on horse-drawn carts to be transported to lumber mill and the finished planks sent, again by horse-drawn carts, to the front.
These paintings shed light on an under-reported aspect of the war – not only the use, by both sides, of millions of horses as draft animals, but the use of lumber as a material which needed to be felled, drawn to lumber mills (themselves constructed behind the lines) with the planking then also taken to the front by horse.
Thus by the end of the war he had produced a large number of drawings, sketches and some 44 oil paintings depicting
- the Canadian cavalry
- the Canadian Forestry Corps
- landscapes, rather idyllic landscapes of the scenery well behind the front
In January and February 1919 the Royal Academy held an exhibition displaying 355 art works produced through the Canadian War Memorials Fund, including forty-five paintings by Munnings. His paintings received praise from critics and visitors alike.
This body of work, and publicity from the RA exhibition, laid the foundation for Munnings’ post-war career. He spent the next thirty years painting old-fashioned equestrian portraits for an impressive number of aristocratic and upper class clients, as well as producing a large number of paintings of race horses.
In 1919 Munnings was admitted to the RA, and 25 years later, for his unbending commitment to utterly conventional political and artistic tastes, Munnings was elected president of the Royal Academy (1944) and then knighted. In recent decades his racehorse paintings have become very collectible and one was auctioned for nearly $8 million in 2007.
The exhibition
This exhibition is the first time Munnings’s forty-five paintings made for the Canadian War Memorials Fund have been reunited and shown together since that Royal Academy exhibition 100 years ago.
(Almost all of the paintings have been loaned from the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa and, once it closes here in the Army Museum, the exhibition will move on to the Munnings Art Museum in Munnings’s old house at Dedham in Suffolk.
The paintings
Once you’ve seen the first few, you immediately get Munnings’s style, which doesn’t change much.
It is Newlyn School-style plein air realism, without the wonderful luminousness of, say, Henry Scott Tuke or the charm of Stanhope Forbes. He uses wide thick semi-impressionist brushstrokes but for a solidly realistic goal.
I was put off by the gloss finish of much of the oil which reflects the gallery lights. You have to find the right angle not to be distracted by reflections. Then again, the further back you stand, the more effective this kind of semi-impressionistic style becomes.
Idyllic landscapes
You can see the influence or the similarity with similar idyllic sunlit landscapes of the Newly School painters. And the two fancy-free Edwardian children at left, little girl with straw boater.
A Stream Bed at Labergement, Jura Forest by Alfred Munnings (1918) © Canadian War Museum
The Canadian cavalry
There are a dozen or so paintings like this showing the Canadian cavalry marching along a straight French road, along another straight French road, stopping by a stream, bivouacking among tents, marching along another straight French road, punctuated by the one imagined depiction of a charge. They all have a sort of muddy realism.
Fort Garry’s on the march by Alfred Munnings (1918) © Canadian War Museum
Timber work
I think the subject of work, real work, hard work, physical labour, is often absent from both literature and art, and I welcome its depiction.
Did you know that the Canadian Forestry Corps was established in 1916 to supply wood for the war? Some 22,000 soldiers served in Scotland, France and England, ‘wielding axes and saws instead of rifles and machine guns’. These forestry units produced 70% of the lumber used by the Allied armies on the Western front. They look used to it. These paintings could have been done in Canada, they capture so well the lumberjack spirit. They were, according to Munnings, ‘grand fellows’.
Felling a tree in the Vosges by Alfred Munnings (1918) © Canadian War Museum
Equestrian portraits
This is the kind of utterly conventional equestrian portrait which inspired hundreds of aristocrats to commission Munnings to do their portraits in the 1920s and 30s and which made him a rich man. To my eye, it’s an adequate enough depiction of the subject but surprisingly rough and loose. It lacks precision and vim. The commentary several times remarked on the accuracy of Munnings’s portraits but they look like generic posh chaps to me. I kept being reminded of the ineffable tedium of Siegfried Sassoon’s book, Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man.
Captain Prince Antoine of Orleans and Braganza by Alfred Munnings (1918) © Canadian War Museum
Display cases
There were three or so display cases showing a range of authentic memorabilia from the period and from the cavalry Munnings depicted – bridle, stirrups, brushes and grooming equipment, a rifle and bullets, some medals – each with an interesting, sometimes poignant, story behind it.
Installation view of Alfred Munnings: War Artist, 1918 at the Army Museum (photo by the author)
Anecdotes not art
When you consider what had been going on in Continental art for several generations before this – the Impressionists, van Gogh, Gauguin, then Matisse and the Fauves, Picasso and Cubism, German Expressionism, Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter, Italian Futurism – you realise that Munnings’s whole approach could hardly have been more conservative and old fashioned.
A moment’s reflection on just the English painters who served as war artists – like Stanley Spencer or Paul Nash or the fabulous C.R.W. Nevinson – makes you realise how heroically fuddy-duddy Munnings’ paintings are.
Let alone memories of Tate Britain’s recent Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One exhibition. That tried to capture the incredible explosion of creativity which took place all across the continent, during and immediately after the war. Next to any of it, Munnings is a Sunday afternoon crossword in Country Life.
On the positive side, if you ignored its failings as art and remember that he saw no actual fighting, then it’s possible to that Munnings did a good and responsible job of reporting what he did see, life and work behind the lines.
His paintings have a lot of anecdotal and historical value, and the exhibition is larded with all kinds of interesting information about a) the role of horses b) the role of the Canadians and c) the role of lumber and wood, in the war on the western Front, all of which are rather neglected subjects.
For example, did you know that horse fodder was the single largest commodity shipped to the front by some countries? Did you know that the charge of Flowerdew’s Squadron at the Battle of Moreuil Wood, in 1918, was ‘the last great cavalry charge’ of the British Army?
Did you know that the Canadian lumberjacks were so productive that British imports of lumber fell from 11.6 million tonnes in 1913 to 2 million tonnes in 1918? No, neither did I. Initially much of this lumber had had to be carried on ships crossing the Atlantic. Since German submarines sank a high percentage of these, it was vitally important that the space given to wood declined so drastically, making way for food and munitions. So much so that a contemporary wrote that the Canadian Forestry Corps ‘helped to defeat the submarine… more surely than a fleet of ships.’
There are a number of paintings of working lumbermills which are very atmospheric. They cut tens of thousands of planks a day. One forestry company in the Jura mountains cut more than 156,000 feet of board in a record-breaking ten hours!
Lumbermen among the pines by Alfred Munnings (1918) © Canadian War Museum
‘Galloping Jack’ Seely and Warrior
There is a little section devoted to one particular fellow, Brigadier-General J.E.B.’Galloping Jack’ Seely, head of the Canadian Cavalry Brigade. Seely’s horse, Warrior, became a legend and has had several books devoted to him. After an hour of posing for the artist, the Brigadier-General was called away and replaced, for artistic purposes, by his batman wearing one of his beribboned uniforms. The commentary tells us that Munnings and the batman were most amused that many of the cavalry trooping by at a distance sternly saluted the chortling batman. Munnings thought the Canadians ‘the finest fellows I ever met’. If you like that kind of anecdote, and you like this kind of semi-modern painting of horses – then this exhibition is for you!
Major-General the Right Honourable J.E.B. Seely by Alfred Munnings (1918) © Canadian War Museum
Summary
From a purely technical, oil painting point of view, it is interesting to study Munnings’s technique, and see up close how he large and roughly applied brushstrokes which are impressionist technique in order to achieve essentially conservative, old fashioned realist effects.
It’s interesting to see what a scion of the Establishment actually looks like, the kind of crusty old buffer which the younger generation at Slade or Bloomsbury were reacting against. Fox-hunting men. It makes you realise the depth and breadth of philistinism which dominated early 20th century Britain.
It reminds me of the Courtauld exhibition, which is still on at the National Gallery, in which we learned of the struggles Samuel Courtauld had to persuade the National Gallery, or any British gallery, to buy works by van Gogh or Gauguin or Monet or Toulouse-Lautrec when they came on the market. Foreign rubbish, said the powers that be. They preferred Munnings.
Which is why American galleries ended up with all the best modern art and both the Tate and National have a very limited collection. Throughout the crucial decades, the philistines were in charge.
All that said, if you like paintings of horses you’ll love these. Personally, I preferred the ones of horses at work in the forests and lumberyards rather than the rather repetitive ones of cavalry trotting along French roads. Working horses of the First World War struck me as being a unique subject which no-one else had painted.
And the exhibition is packed with facts and figures – about horses and about the Canadian war effort – which are genuinely interesting, and shed light on your understanding of the war.
So, for me then, this exhibition – handsomely staged and full of informative wall labels – is more interesting as history and anecdote than as art.
Related links
- Alfred Munnings: War Artist continues at the National Army Museum until 3 March 2019
Reviews of other NAM exhibitions
World War One-related art reviews
- Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
- Heath Robinson’s War Effort @ the Heath Robinson Museum (November 2018)
- Frank Brangwyn and the First World War @ William Morris Gallery (July 2014)
- The Great War in Portraits @ National Portrait Gallery (March 2014)
World War One-related book reviews
- The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917 to 1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016)
- Lenin on The Train by Catherine Merridale (2016)
- Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia by Dominic Lieven (2015)
- Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010)
- Forgotten Victory: the First World War Myths and Realities by Gary Sheffield (2001)
- A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)
- Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon (1936)
- Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis (1936)
- All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
- The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme And Ancre, 1916 by Frederic Manning (1929)
- Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
- Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden (1928)
- In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
- Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger (1920)
- Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (1917)
Books & Boots 