BG 147

 

SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS, PRA, RWS

Mendham 1878 - 1959 Dedham

 

Miss Millicent Baron on Magpie

 

Signed lower left: A.J. MUNNINGS

Canvas: 30 ½ x 38 in / 77.5 x 96.5 cm

 

Painted in 1929

 

Provenance:

Private collection, UK

Christie’s London, 11^th October 1974, lot 186

Richard Green, London, 1974

Frost & Reed, London, 1975, no.61

Sotheby’s London, 22^nd June 1977, lot 36

Mr and Mrs Montgomery Fisher, USA

 

Exhibited:

London, Royal Academy, 1930, no.227

 

Literature:

Sir Alfred Munnings, The Second Burst, London 1951, p.326

 

To be included in the catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Sir Alfred Munnings being prepared by Lorian Peralta-Ramos

 

 

In the 1920s and 30s Alfred Munnings developed a flourishing career as a painter of equestrian portraits, reviving a tradition that went back to Titian and Rubens. The miller’s son from Mendham now moved in high society, racing with the Rothchilds at Deauville and rubbing shoulders with the Prince of Wales at Biarritz. A trip to America in 1924 had added that nation’s plutocrats to his list of admirers: among others, he painted a superb equestrian portrait of the New England financier Frederick Henry Prince, Master of the Pau Foxhounds (private collection, USA).

 

This portrait of Millicent Baron, heiress to the Carreras tobacco empire, epitomises Munnings’s brilliance as an equestrian portraitist. He subtly integrates the young girl in effortless command of her dark bay horse with the fresh, early summer landscape of her father’s estate at Fulmer in Buckinghamshire. The creams and beiges of Millicent’s riding clothes are echoed in the blossom of the may tree and the candle-shaped flowers of the towering chestnut. The copper beech in glossy new leaf picks up the brown and midnight-blue tones of Magpie’s rippling coat. Following the practice of Stubbs, Munnings presents the horse in profile, as beautifully cut as a horse on a Parthenon frieze, emphasizing its noble gait and superb configuration. Photographs of Millicent confirm how well Munnings has caught the likeness of his human sitter.

 

Millicent was the great-granddaughter of Bernhard Baron (1850-1929), Chairman of Carreras. Born in Brest Litovsk, Belarus, Baron emigrated to New York in 1867 and worked in a tobacco factory, sleeping at night in the tobacco sheds. Five years later he took out his first patent for a machine for making cigarettes. In 1895 he settled in London and joined the tobacco retailer and blender Carreras, remaining its Chairman until his death. With innovative marketing and famous brands like Black Cat and Craven A, Carreras prospered on the wave of fashion for cigarettes in the opening decades of the twentieth century. A major philanthropist, Bernhard Baron gave away more than £2 million to help the poor, but was still worth £5 million at his death.

 

Millicent’s parents were Edward, a nephew of Bernhard Baron, and Bertha Levy, a child of the Baltimore branch of the Baron family, who had prospered in the cloth trade. The Barons moved in the chicest circles. ‘My grandmother had her salon decorated by Syrie Maugham and my grandfather shot pheasant with the Duke of Norfolk’, Millicent’s daughter Elizabeth Luard recounts in her memoirs[1]. The brilliant scientist Miriam Rothschild, a contemporary of Millicent, commented: ‘The English Rothschilds were not like the Barons. We were a dull lot compared to them’[2].

 

Munnings painted portraits of Millicent on Magpie and her elder sister Miss Betty Baron on Freckles (RA 1933) in the early summer of 1929. Munnings later joined the family at the villa in Biarritz which they had rented from Princesse Murat. Mornings were spent at La Chambre d’Amour, ‘a sort of Royal Enclosure where only millionaires, their wives and friends bathe, bask in the sun, drink cocktails, eat lobster salads’[3]. In the evenings the dashing young Prince of Wales, the future Duke of Windsor, would come over to the villa to dance.

 

‘A beauty and a flirt, like all the Baron women’[4], Millicent Baron married Richard Longmore, son of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, at the beginning of the Second World War. ‘Both remarkably handsome and unusually courageous’[5], Wing Commander Longmore MBE, DSO, DFC was killed in action in 1943. Four years later she married Longmore’s Eton schoolfriend and fellow RAF officer David (later Sir David) Hildyard, who enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, ably abetted by Millicent’s social flair.

SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS, PRA, RWS

Mendham 1878 - 1959 Dedham

 

 

Born in Mendham, Suffolk, Alfred Munnings was the son of a miller.  He was apprenticed to a firm of lithographers from 1893 to 1898 and studied at the Norwich School of Art and in Paris. There he was impressed with plein-air naturalism; this, together with his introduction to the racecourse in 1899, influenced the themes for which he became famous.

 

While in Mendham, Munnings painted many scenes of country life, particularly horse fairs.  He went to Cornwall in 1908, and for many years was an important addition to the Newlyn School of artists.  When the First World War broke out, Munnings enlisted, despite having the use of only one eye owing to an accident in 1899.  He became an army horse trainer near Reading and later went to France as an official war artist, attached to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade.

 

The year 1919 was a major turning-point in all aspects of Munnings’s life; he painted his first racehorse, Poethlyn, the winner of the Grand National, and became an Associate of the Royal Academy.  He met Violet McBride, whom he was to marry, and bought Castle House, Dedham, where the Munnings Memorial Trust maintains a permanent exhibition of his pictures. Munnings’s prolific career, spanning over sixty years, brought him honour, with election to the Presidency of the Royal Academy in 1944, a Knighthood in 1945, and a personal award from the Sovereign in 1947, when he was created Knight of the Royal Victorian Order.