Crostwick Common: Woman with a Donkey and Geese was executed in 1904, when Munnings stayed at an inn called the Crostwick White Horse, near Norwich, and painted at Crostwick Common. In his memoir An Artist’s Life, published nearly fifty years after the picture was completed, Munnings recalled those charmed days:

‘Then came the open Common. There were the donkeys, young and old, a coloured cow or two, a white horse peacefully standing on a knoll – the wind stirring its tail – and geese and ponies. What a Common! … calm, grey autumn days followed in succession in that particular year; days with soft “barred clouds” stretching across the sky. I see the bramble patches, the dark clumps of gorse and purple torns and yellow bracken, the donkeys with their white muzzles, feeding, and the geese far away near the stream at the end. Here I was in my twenties, with everything around me to paint’ (A.J. Munnings, An Artist’s Life, London, 1950, pp. 204-5).

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SIR ALFRED JAMES MUNNINGS, P.R.A., R.W.S. (BRITISH, 1878-1959), Crostwick Common:, Woman with a donkey and geese, signed and dated ‘A.J. MUNNINGS /1904’ (lower right), oil on canvas, 17 x 20 in. (43.2 x 50.8 cm.), Source: Christie’s

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