Alfred Munnings, the son of a Suffolk miller, left school at the age of fourteen and a half when he was apprenticed as a commercial artist. Attending evening classes at the Norwich School of Art, Munnings would go on to become one of the most successful English artists of the first half of the twentieth century, ending his long career as President of the Royal Academy.

This lecture looks at his amazing and extensive artistic output from his early life as a commercial artist, through the extraordinarily evocative and powerful depictions of Canadian soldiers during the First World to his mature work as this country’s leading sporting and equestrian artist. It also touches on the controversy around his views on modern art and as such acts as an accessible examination of the tensions between figurative painting and non-representational art during the early twentieth century.