Studio: international art (78.1919)

THE ART OF A. J. MUNNINGS, A.R.A.

"FELLING A TREE IN THE JURA”
BY A. J. MUNNINGS, A.R.A.

(Canadian War Records)

rably as they generalized grace of move-
ment, and perfect as was sometimes the
arrangement of their design, it remained for
a modern painter, inheriting much from
Impressionism and more, perhaps, from
the technical example of Sargent, to show
us the horse not cut out from the actual
atmospheric conditions in which he would
be viewed on the course, but portrayed in
them. The modern painter has brought
to this task a spontaneity of style which
enables him to keep pace with the most
transitory effects. It is just this sponta-
neity, so characteristic of modern art, that
we miss in the old conventional paintings
of racing subjects. It was not that the
io

painters of those formal-looking pictures
were incapable of achieving anything of the
kind; they were “ out ” for something
different from it. In spirit their portraits
of the winners of famous races were com-
memorative, and viewed in this light the
conventions they employed are almost
perfect. 00000
Munnings was led on by degrees to the
interest he now takes in the horse of the
racing type. His early works depicted
farm-horses and gipsy-ponies. The
animals were seen as part of the landscape
which was their setting, and in that period
there was the feeling for landscape—ending
sometimes in the painting of pure land-