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Sybil Harker on Saxa, with the Norwich Staghounds signed 'A. J. Munnings' (lower right) oil on canvas 341/2 x 40 in. (87.6 x 101.6 cm.) PROVENANCE By direct descent in the family of the sitter until 1990, when acquired by the sitter's niece. LITERATURE A. J. Munnings, The Finish, Bungay, 1952, p. 319. NOTES Munnings excelled at painting formal equestrian portraits of elegant women, as exemplified by the present work, Sybil Harker on Saxa, with the Norwich Staghounds. Aside from a common interest in hunting, there was clearly a rapport between artist and sitter and the two remained lifelong friends. Sybil Harker is classically portrayed in profile riding sidesaddle on her bay hunter, Saxa, against a Norfolk landscape. The hound in the foreground is believed to have been her favourite, a suggestion that is supported by its prominence and its placement in the same visual plane as the rider. Around them are grouped the rest of the hounds and the hunt in the distance, dominated by the towers of Wymondham Abbey. An accomplished rider and huntswoman, Sybil Harker was Master of the Norwich Staghounds for over thirty years before and after the Second World War. Munnings regularly rode out with the Staghounds whose members comprised 'a cavalcade of farmers, a doctor or two, a squire or two, a butcher, perhaps, a veterinary, some hard riding ladies' (see A. J. Munnings, An Artist's Life, Bungay, 1950, p. 257). Munnings enjoyed an unofficial status as artist to the hunt and as such was allowed to dress-down in the style of the farmers of the hunt. He describes how he typically rode out with 'a black velvet cap on my head, a dark grey melton coat, white cord breeches and boots with brown tops' ( ibid., p. 256). Hunting represented to Munnings a romantic link to a rural past and a way of life that was being threatened by changes in the countryside. He wrote, 'I could fill a volume if I began to recount the many adventures and doings when following hounds in Norfolk, long before the first war - when people drove to a meet with a horse and trap and when no long procession of motor-cars followed along the road from one draw to another' ( ibid., p. 262). Describing a hunt with the Staghounds, he waxes lyrical 'Church steeples show ahead and are left behind. Through quiet villages and farms we clatter on into open country again. The pack slackens to a check. Again hounds are on the line, and so, hugging headlands and furrow on the ploughland, and sailing on across pastures and a stubble or two' ( ibid., pp. 257-8). A legendary figure in the Norwich Staghounds was Tom Thackeray, the Huntsman. Many years later, as he was writing about Thackeray in the third volume of his Memoirs, Munnings was interrupted by a telephone call: 'The hour was late... It was Sybil Harker... a tall, swell girl - still a girl for me - Sybil, who for years had been Master of the hounds that Thackeray had hunted! Sybil's voice it was unbelievable. Hearing that soft, full contralto, I saw her as she had sat for me along ago on her horse. She was tall and dark, wearing a dark blue habit and a black velvet cap. Her horse was a big bay, called Saxa, named after the table salt; Thackeray with the hounds in the background, the tall twin towers of Wymondham Church in the distance. This night of all nights in the year, it is a strange coincidence that Sybil Harker should have rung me up asking to stay at Wacton, at the moment when I was writing of Tom - her huntsman of yore' (see A. J. Munnings, The Finish, Bungay, 1952, p. 319).