Sir Alfred Munnings' Ned Osborne on Grey Tick provided the headline lot of a sale of pre-Raphaelite art at Sotheby's, achieving £605,000 ($944,798).
It realised a 21% increase on a £500,000 ($780,675) estimate when it crossed the block in London on July 15.
 Munnings was an acclaimed horse painter |
Munnings was an acclaimed painter of horses and a fervent opponent of modernism. In 1949, he appeared on a radio show to give a rambling, drunken valedictory speech.
At one point he relates how Winston Churchill had once said to him: "Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his ... something something?"
Munnings replied "Yes Sir, I would".
The present lot depicts his stable hand, Ned Osborne, exercising a horse at his studio in Lamorna, Cornwall.
John Atkinson Grimshaw's Prince's Dock, Hull was another highlight, selling for £257,000 ($402,308).
Sotheby's comments: "Grimshaw celebrated the modernity of the nineteenth century; the age of industry, commerce and conspicuous wealth, in a series of paintings in which moonlight and lamplight contrast with one another and skeletal trees or ship's rigging are interchangeable."
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