
Thomas Seaman
Specialist, Head of Sale
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Sold for £112,160 inc. premium
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Specialist, Head of Sale
Provenance
With Frost & Reed, London.
With Ian MacNicol, Glasgow.
Private collection, UK (acquired from the above in 1968).
Exhibited
London, Royal Academy, Diploma gallery, Sir Alfred Munnings, 1956, no. 129 as Withypool Hill (lent by H. J. Dunsmuir Esq., Martnaham by Ayr, Scotland).
Literature
Sir Alfred Munnings, The Finish: The Autobiography of Sir Alfred Munnings K.C.V.O., P.P.R.A., vol. III, Bungay, 1952, p. 80, illustrated.
I sat down... and just listened to the sound of water and songs of skylarks, and watched, with pleasure beyond words, those beautiful moving cloud-shadows passing over the hill, down the combe. Sometimes the hillside and its top were paler than the sky, and sometimes darker; but there were always the rare quality of the blue sky.
Sir Alfred Munnings, The Finish, p. 67
Munnings moved to Withypool in the early 1940s after Castle House, his home in Dedham, was requisitioned by the Army. He produced a startling series of works of Withypool and Brightworthy, returning to the same spots to capture the landscape and the river Barle in different conditions. As Marcia Whiting notes in the exhibition catalogue to Munnings & the River, 'Munnings painted at least twenty five scenes at Brightworthy, Withypool, which consists of two distinct compositions; a tree-topped mount and an extensive rolling landscape... Munnings was so mesmerized by these two motifs that he painted them repeatedly, capturing the variations in light, the movement of the water and multitude of dramatic sky formations.'1
For other examples, sold in these rooms, see Bonhams, London, 31 March 2021, lot 77 and 22 September 2021, lot 81.
1Marcia Whiting, Munnings & the River, Munnings Art Museum, 2017, p 44.