Forgot his brushes

Have you ever forgotten your brushes on a painting excursion? Sir Alfred Munnings did. Here's what happened.

"Once on Exmoor, not long ago," he writes in his memoir, "I arrived by car at Cloud Farm to paint Bagsworthy Water, some twelve miles away, and found I had forgotten my brushes. I have developed the habit of carrying my brushes separately in a brown-paper roll. A box holds a miserable handful, and I like at least one big brush among the twenty or thirty I choose to take...." 

"....With no brushes, I viciously chewed the ends of pieces of wood, tied paint-rags on sticks, sought out minute fir-cones washed down in spate to the stream's bank, some of these matted with fine strands of grass. A teazle was a grand thing on such an occasion. Cursing and raging not to be beaten, I found that with these tools I could do a lot, and the final result was much the same as if I had used brushes."

"I returned next day. Conditions were the same. I sat in the same place near the roaring foam. I made the same design and painted another picture ; this time with brushes. Afterwards, placing the two canvases side by side, and standing back to look, they appeared exactly the same, four yards away."

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Sir Alfred Munnings (1878-1959) on Wikipedia
From "An Artist's Life" by Alfred Munnings (free ebook)
Some of the images courtesy Sir Alfred Munnings Museum at his home, Castle House in Dedham, Essex. (thanks, Beth Munnings-Winter)