'How lovely are the things you help us to perceive'

Pictures should 'fill a man's soul with admiration and sheer joy, Sir Alfred Munnings famously said. Octavia Pollock charts his eventful life and argues that he perhaps does not receive the credit he deserves for the enjoyment his varied and vivid work has brought

- Octavia Pollock

Munnings in his Swainsthorpe studio, with Path to the Orchard on an easel.

Sir Alfred Munnings (1878–1959)

FEW with an interest in art have not heard of Sir Alfred Munnings's 1949 resignation speech at the Royal Academy (RA). His blistering attack on modern art, broadcast on the BBC and hailed by the public, if not the art establishment, was the climactic moment in a relationship with the RA that began in 1899, when his first two paintings, Stranded (of two of his cousins in a rowing boat) and Pike Fishing in January (of kind local man Jumbo' Betts), were accepted for the Summer Exhibition. In his engaging autobiography, An Artist's Life, he calls that moment 'infinite bliss' and, as he became known and sent works every year, he 'dreaded being rejected and out!'

Becoming RA president in 1944 was 'an honour' and he walked home through bomb-blighted London full of 'lofty hopes for the future of English art'. However, his romanticism and ardent admiration for his British forebears, from Reynolds to Millais and Lucy Kemp-Welch, caused a swell of feeling against the turn 20th-century art had taken. 'What are pictures for?' he asked. “To fill a man's soul with admiration and sheer joy, not to bewilder and daze him.' Modern artists were guilty of 'affected juggling', anathema to Munnings's egalitarian aims. Students were learning 'to become what? Not artists'.

Equine power in a favourite subject: Under Starter's Orders, 1947