His own work shows great powers of observation and is executed with a lively panache. His caricature of himself shows him full of verve as he attacks a canvas with outstretched brush.
He was inspired to live in Cornwall by Laura Knight's painting of 1909. 'The Beach' and he fitted into the Newlyn painters' convivial scene. He had sight in only one eye following a boyhood injury and therefore was rejected for WW1 service although he later became a Canadian war artist depicting horses in action.
Horses were Munnings' speciality. It jars now to see a trio of hunting scenes and Penlee try to minimise this by a caption saying that Munnings once had an exhausted fox set free. In a jolly Christmas cartoon he showed a fox standing on a stool joining in dinner as an equal hunter with the two human huntsman.
My favourite work was a painting of a blue stockinged young Phyllis Crocker looking very modern and pensive, seated on rocks with dark hills behind her.
There is a lovely illustrated poem showing a woman riding,with the words, 'My many cares I then forget In wide and peaceful eventide.'
I can't help but see this as a sad allusion to his having married a wife who tried to kill herself on their honeymoon and subsequently fell for his friend, Captain Gilbert Evans, who left to serve overseas. She then succeeded in suicide. Munnings magnaminously gave his bravura painting of her on horseback to her lover. Later he married again, choosing another woman who looked very well on a horse.
The exhibition includes works by other painters of the Newlyn artists' colony plus letters written by Munnings. Thus his work is placed in context and he comes to life as a person, excelling in his painterly realism whilst unable to comprehend the way modern art was developing in France.
Then as now there were many competent and worthwhile arists who leave us interesting observations without aspiring to be avant-garde ground breakers.
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