he Museum is situated at Castle House, Dedham, which Sir Alfred Munnings bought in 1919. He put up a studio building in the garden and lived and worked here for the rest of his life. He married Violet McBride, a noted horsewoman, in 1920 and after his death in 1959, she decided to devote the house to his memory by establishing a museum to display those pictures which were still in her possession. Castle House was first opened to the public in 1961 and a year later she set up the Violet Munnings Trust Fund, formed for the purpose of financing an art museum. Four years later the Castle House Trust came into existence as a charitable organisation. The ownership of the house, its furnishings and Sir Alfred’s paintings, together with some 40 acres of surrounding land and an endowment fund, were vested in the Trustees.
The greater part of the picture collection consisted of juvenilia, early advertising work, drawings and sketches, works dating from the artist’s youth in Norfolk and landscapes which Sir Alfred had painted for his own satisfaction in and around Dedham. However, most periods of his life are represented. There are figure subjects done when he studied as a young man at the Atelier Julian in Paris; scenes of gipsy life; pictures painted at Lamorna in Cornwall, where he had a studio for a while attracted by the Newlyn School; military subjects which he painted in France in 1918 in his capacity as an official War Artist attached to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade; and scenes of Exmoor, where he and Violet lived during the Second World War while Castle House was requisitioned by the army. In 1919 Munnings was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy and he received his knighthood on becoming its President in 1944. From the First World War onwards, he concentrated increasingly on equestrian portraits, paintings of horses and hunting and racing scenes. Since most of these were commissioned, they are hardly represented in the collection but there are a number of studies of horses and jockeys at the starting gate and in the unsaddling enclosure.
Lady Munnings died in 1971 and shortly afterwards the Trustees decided to add to the collection whenever possible. The first purchases, made in 1973, were A Suffolk Horse Fair, Lavenham (1901), Flower Girl, Violets (c.1904),A Gipsy Camp Fire (1910), Tagg’s Island (1920) and A Shoot in a Swede Field (1901). Other early pictures were acquired in subsequent years but by the mid-1980s, the rising price of paintings by Munnings, even early or unusual ones, had become prohibitive and the Trust lacked the means to compete in the open market for any major work. Fortunately, since then some welcome gifts have been received and a magnificent picture of ‘Shrimp’ on a White Welsh Pony was bequeathed to the Museum in 2002.