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拍品专文
Munnings's love of the rural Norfolk landscape and lifestyle dominated his art in the first decade of the 20th century. In the summers of 1910 and 1911, he went on extended painting expeditions from his home at Swainsthorpe to the nearby Ringland Hills, making his headquarters at The Falcon Inn at Costessey. Here he found ready subjects and models in the horse dealers, families of gypsies and ponies that congregated at the fairs and public houses throughout the summer months. However, it was the images of the gypsy boy Shrimp with the artist’s collection of ponies that would come to define this period of Munnings’s oeuvre and create some of his most celebrated pictures.
Shrimp, whose real name was Fountain George Page, was so called due to his diminutive stature as he measured around five feet tall. The illegitimate son of a housemaid at Narford Hall near Swaffham, Shrimp, like Munnings, preferred horses to people and had run away from home to work with the animals that he loved. When Munnings met him through the horse dealer James Drake, he was sleeping under Drake’s caravan. In 1908, money changed hands between Drake and the artist, and Shrimp became Munnings's full-time model and horse-minder. In return, Munnings paid him a wage and bought him a new suit of clothes, consisting of a tight pair of 'dealer' trousers, a pearl-buttoned Georgian waistcoat, a cloth cap, and a yellow neckerchief.
Painted during their second summer in Ringland Hills, the image of Shrimp riding bareback on the dun colored pony with the flash of yellow at his neck, is redolent of all Munnings’s images of his ‘paradise’ painting ground.
We are grateful to Lorian Peralta-Ramos, Tristram Lewis and the Curatorial staff at The Munnings Museum for their assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.
Shrimp, whose real name was Fountain George Page, was so called due to his diminutive stature as he measured around five feet tall. The illegitimate son of a housemaid at Narford Hall near Swaffham, Shrimp, like Munnings, preferred horses to people and had run away from home to work with the animals that he loved. When Munnings met him through the horse dealer James Drake, he was sleeping under Drake’s caravan. In 1908, money changed hands between Drake and the artist, and Shrimp became Munnings's full-time model and horse-minder. In return, Munnings paid him a wage and bought him a new suit of clothes, consisting of a tight pair of 'dealer' trousers, a pearl-buttoned Georgian waistcoat, a cloth cap, and a yellow neckerchief.
Painted during their second summer in Ringland Hills, the image of Shrimp riding bareback on the dun colored pony with the flash of yellow at his neck, is redolent of all Munnings’s images of his ‘paradise’ painting ground.
We are grateful to Lorian Peralta-Ramos, Tristram Lewis and the Curatorial staff at The Munnings Museum for their assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.