Behind the Lines: Alfred Munnings, War Artist, 1918

In 1918 Alfred Munnings was appointed as a war artist in France for the Canadian Cavalry Brigade and later for the Canadian Forestry Corps. At the war’s end his paintings were bought by the Canadian government and 41 of them are now in the collection of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. This book, which was published to mark the centenary year of the first exhibition of the paintings at the Royal Academy in London in 1919, is the most comprehensive record of them to date provides a rare opportunity to present the pictures alongside their preparatory sketches and studies which remain in the Munnings Art Museum’s own collection.

In his later life Sir Alfred Munnings reflected “I have often wondered had there been no 1914–18 war whether painting people on horseback would have absorbed the greater part of my efforts in the years that followed”.