Sir Alfred James Munnings, P.R.A., R.W.S. (1878-1959) - The saw mill in the forest of Dreux, 1918

Sir Alfred James Munnings, P.R.A., R.W.S. (1878-1959).

The saw mill in the forest of Dreux, 1918.

oil on canvas.
signed 'A.J. Munnings' (lower right).
20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm).
27½ x 31½ in. (69.8 x 80 cm) framed.

Provenance:
Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, to whom presented by the Canadian Forestry Corps;
Thence by descent.

Exhibited:
Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, 2nd April - 4th June 1955 - An Artist's Life, Retrospective Exhibition of Works of Sir Alfred Munnings.

This rare war subject by Munnings is supported by fascinating royal provenance and has remained in a private collection until now.
 
Following the outbreak of war in 1914, Munnings had been unable to enlist on medical grounds due to his blindness in one eye. He continued developing his reputation as a painter before, in early 1917, a friend secured him a position suiting his vast equine experience, preparing horses for deployment to the front in Calcot Park near Reading. It was while serving there that a greater opportunity to make an artistic contribution to the war materialised, when he was commissioned by the Canadian War Memorial Fund, set up by Sir Max Aitken, to record the role of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France. Arriving in January 1918, Munnings spent a period behind the lines with the Canadian Cavalry Brigade and after a brief spell back in England, returned to France to tour the Canadian Forestry Corps’ camps, which is the subject of this painting.
 
Munnings’ depictions of the Forestry Corps are especially valuable as they record a lesser known, yet vital, contribution to the war effort, away from the well-documented front lines. The war placed significant strain on merchant shipping, requiring Britain and France to reduce timber imports and make use of their own reserves. Huge quantities of wood were required to sustain the Western Front and to fulfil this need, the British Government requested the services of Canada’s highly skilled and experienced logging workforce. By May 1916 the first Canadian Forestry Battalion was established. The impact of the CFC operation is described in the book Alfred Munnings - Memory, The War Horse, and the Canadians in 1918 (2018) by Brough Scott and Jonathan Black:
 
Munnings first ventured to Forestry Corps companies at work in Normandy. He was quick to grasp the sheer scale of Canadian activity - with habitual brisk efficiency cutting down huge trees within vast, seemingly primordial forests, removing the felled trunks by teams of impressive-looking horses to be processed in recently erected logging camps - already the size of small towns...Most man and horse power was focused on bringing cut trees to be reduced to manageable-sized pieces for use on the Western Front, where the demand was insatiable: for duckboards in trenches, to shore up the sides of trenches and dugouts, to repair shelled bridges and canals and especially for railway sleepers. By the spring of 1918, the Forestry Corps had 89 sawmills and 73 logging engines operating in France. During that year, the Corps supplied the BEF in France with over three quarters of a million tons of timber - for making roads, railway sleepers, huts, hospital wards, hundreds of aeroplane propellers and for fuel in wood-burning stoves and steam locomotives.
 
Unsurprisingly, Munnings was drawn to record the integral role of horses within the CFC. In this work he depicts two Draught horses before the saw mill in the forest of Dreux in the Loire valley, where he spent two weeks. The magnificent work horses would haul immense logs across difficult terrain to the mill. Munnings captures their beauty but also presents them as firm and resilient. Piles of timber sit behind the pair which are beautifully represented with broad brushstrokes of rich impasto paint, while the billowing smoke beyond captures the mill in full operation. Munnings recounts his experience in the forest of Dreux in the first volume of his autobiography Sir Alfred Munnings KCVO, An Artist's Life, London 1950:
 
Then came the area of the forest of Dreux, one of the finest in France, taking up fifteen square miles of ground... Each company had a hundred and twenty horses, all half-bred Percheron types, mostly blacks and greys. A rivalry existed between the companies as to which had the best-conditioned teams.
 
The CFC also had many lumber camps in Britain, the first of which was erected at Virginia Water near Egham. Their activity stretched into Windsor Great Park and attracted the interest of the Royal Family and in particular, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who was based at Windsor Castle during the war. This is described in the 1919 book The Canadian Forestry Corps – Its Inception, Development and Achievement by C. W. Bird and Lieutenant J. B. Davies:
 
The Virginia Water Camp owes very much to the most kind interest taken in the welfare of the men by H.R.H. Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, who arranged many concerts and entertainments and in every way possible made the leisure hours of the Canadians as happy as could be. The Camp was honoured on many occasions by visits by their Majesties the King and Queen, and by various persons of high rank.
 
As a thank you for this generosity, the CFC presented this painting to Princess Alice following the war and it has remained in the family by descent since. 
 
In his catalogue introduction for the major Munnings retrospective at the Athenaeum Gallery in Manchester in 1986, Nicolas Usherwood says Munnings’ war-time pictures ‘show just how versatile and responsive an artist he could be’. 44 war paintings by Munnings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1919 to great public acclaim and soon after he was elected an A.R.A. The exhibition included a version of this painting, now in the Canadian War Museum collection in Ottawa. It is likely the CFC commissioned the present painting following the Royal Academy exhibition. More recently, Munnings’ war paintings were celebrated in a major exhibition at the National Army Museum in 2018, which also included the Canadian War Museum’s version of this painting. 

Price on application

This object is eligible for a Certificate of BADA Provenance

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