An artist’s home

Munnings purchased Castle House in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1919, flush with success after exhibiting his Canadian Cavalry works and selling £3,000 worth of his Cornish paintings, although he feared he had bought above his station: ‘Who was I? A mere painter.’ In 1928, he became president of the Dedham Vale Society, devoted to preserving Constable Country. True to his wishes, Lady Munnings opened the house as a museum in 1961, now run by the Castle House Trust. It is home to 650 oil paintings and 50 watercolours, plus 54 sketchbooks and 1,000 loose sketches, most given in trust by Lady Munnings in 1966. The archive holds more than 7,000 items, from photographs to letters and exhibition catalogues, as well as furniture collected by the artist; much of the house is as he left it. In the garden is the studio he built behind his aunt’s farmhouse in Swainsthorpe, Norfolk, and re-erected at Castle House in 1919 (01206 322127; www.munningsmuseum.org.uk).