For the love of a lady

An image of Mr Sponge’s sporting bride, a Danish landscape and sun-kissed Pyramids are stars of a summer sale of paintings at Christie’s

IT is so long since I read Mr Sponge’s Sporting Tour by the great Robert Surtees thatI had to scrabble a bit to place the references to ‘Lucy Glitters’ and ‘the Nonsuch Hunt’ on the artist’s label on the reverse of a Munnings in Christie’s London sale of European 19th- and 20thcentury paintings early this summer. It was the 44in by 70in Who’s the Lady? (Fig 3), which was sold, together with two oil studies, for £226,800.

Mr Sponge, Surtees’s scoundrelly antihero, was a horse coper and always on the hunt for a welldowered bride, but, eventually, he fell for the beautiful and ‘tolerably virtuous’ showgirl Lucy Glit- ters. In a slight change of direction for both, they set up ‘a splendid establishment in Jermyn Street, St James’s, now known as the Sponge Cigar and Betting Rooms’.

It will have amused Munnings that, as recorded on his label, the central figures of the painting had originally been Princess Mary, the Princess Royal, being saluted by her husband, the Earl of Harewood, and members of the Bramham Moor Hunt. He made a larger version of that subject, repurposing this canvas for the rather less elevated heroine. From the technical point of view, one of the impressive features of Who’s the Lady? is the febrile waving of the hounds’ sterns.