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PONIES IN A SAND PIT 1910-1911 "The shadows of the pit were warm and glowing; the gravel bright red and gold in the sun; scarlet poppies, marguerite daisies and masses of white flowers all about." (Sir Alfred James Munnings, An Artist's Life, p. 197-198). Sir Alfred James Munnings painted several works of ponies in a sandpit during the summers of 1908-1911. Munnings' largest canvas from this series, A Norfolk Sandpit, measuring four-by-six feet, was completed in the summer of 1911 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1912. The present example bears strong compositional similarities and was likely also painted in the sandpit near Hoxne, Suffolk. Sitting in the Royal Academy galleries, Munnings remembers in his 1950 memoirs: "Later in the day I took a critical glance at the Sandpit painting. In the quiet loneliness of the Galleries it sent me thinking of the 1911 summer when working in Suffolk. Painted thirty-eight years ago, I knew I could not do it to-day. I had neither the energy to get ponies to a place forty miles away, make arrangements for them, nor to place a canvas and easel each day in the heat in the same place in the sandpit." The white pony featured in this painting is one of his favorites and is seen throughout his oeuvre. Called Augereau, Munnings came up with this name after seeing a play called "A Royal Divorce" at the theatre one afternoon. A character in the play continuously exclaims, "I swear it on the word of an Augereau." Driving the pony home after the theater late at night, whenever the pony misbehaved, Munnings and his groom would correct him and exclaim, "I swear it on the word of an Augereau!" and thus the name and the pony were forever one. Augereau, wrote Munnings, "not only [brought] me wealth, but [earned] his keep a hundredfold."