The Munnings portrait that has lived inside the Astor family since the 1930s reaches the market

There is a kind of commission that tells you everything you need to know about an artist: not the public gallery work, selected and submitted for approval, but the private order, placed by someone who knows the painter well enough to ask for exactly what they want. Alfred Munnings painted Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor, in the late 1930s at Cliveden — the Thames-side estate in Berkshire that had become one of Britain’s most consequential addresses — and the result carries a quality of understanding that only genuine rapport between artist and patron produces.

The work shows the 2nd Viscount mounted on Simondale II, a chestnut horse belonging to his son William — “Bill” — Astor, who would succeed him as the 3rd Viscount. Munnings places horse and rider against what is almost certainly the paddock beyond Cliveden’s formal gardens: an open background that concentrates attention entirely on the relationship between man and animal. What defines the picture is the painter’s way with the horse at the shoulder and haunch — weight in motion rendered with a precision that comes from a lifetime studying horses not from the grandstand but from among them. The rider’s posture is easy, alert, the whole composition built on a shared calm between subject and painter.

The portrait is closely related to A Summer Evening, Cliveden (1939) — now in the National Trust collection — which shows the 2nd Viscount in the same paddock setting, seated and at rest, surrounded by mares and foals. The commission for the equestrian portrait was placed by William “Bill” Astor, the sitter’s son, as part of a sustained effort to document his father’s world at the estate. It has remained within the Astor family by direct descent ever since: never publicly sold, never publicly exhibited until now. Bonhams estimates the work at £200,000–300,000.

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Cliveden in those years was more than a country house. Under the Astors, the estate gathered a circle that included Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Rudyard Kipling, Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Bernard Shaw. Munnings navigated that atmosphere with the confidence of a painter at ease among the landed and the celebrated, and the portrait carries something of that concentrated social world — a single man on a horse, the estate and its circle quietly present behind him.

The sale includes several other significant works. Henri Adolphe Laissement’s Au Salon des Artistes Français en 1911 (estimated £100,000–150,000) — a picture within a picture, painted for the 1912 Salon and depicting the previous year’s edition — is one of the most self-referential documents of the French exhibition system. James Jacques Joseph Tissot’s Départ du fiancé is estimated at £150,000–250,000; Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky’s An Oxwagon Traversing a Ford on a Moonlit Evening at £120,000–180,000; and Eugène Alexis Girardet’s The game of draughts at £70,000–100,000.

Bonhams’ 19th Century & British Impressionist Art Sale takes place on 23 September 2026 at New Bond Street, London. A public exhibition opens on 18 September, free of charge, at Bonhams’ New Bond Street salerooms. Further information: press@bonhams.com.

For Munnings, the commission made perfect sense: a horse painting for people who understood horses from the inside.

Tags: Bonhams, Alfred Munnings, British art auctions, Cliveden, equestrian paintings, Waldorf Astor

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