John Munday was primarily a museum curator, but after early art training remained a leisure painter and occasional copyist of other works. Born on 10th April 1924 in Portsmouth, he attended the Northern Grammar School and was an assistant in the City library when drafted into the wartime Navy in 1942. He served briefly in a minesweeper, then mainly ashore in southern Italy and was commissioned sub-lieutenant RNVR in 1944. Demobilised at Portsmouth in 1946, he gained a Durham University BA in fine art in 1950 through a two-year course at King’s College, Newcastle, where one of his teachers was (Sir) Roger de Grey, later President of the Royal Academy, and where he met his wife, Brenda, née Warden (1929–2023); they married in 1953. In 1951 his appointment to the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, as Assistant Keeper in charge of its library, was a first step in an effective and varied career there.
Munday’s early Greenwich interest in the Victorian marine painter Edward William Cooke first developed into a Durham MA thesis on him (1961) and – over thirty years later – his comprehensive and magnificently illustrated E.W. Cooke, 1811–1883: a man of his time (1996). He continued to draw and paint throughout his life, illustrated two early museum booklets on swords and firearms, and in 1978 his own scholarly but characteristically amusing essay (for a colleague’s festschrift) on ‘Heads and Tails: the Necessary Seating’ – lavatorial arrangements in the sailing navy.
His painting included a few portraits and he was also a copyist, mainly from the Greenwich collection: the maritime museum at Barcelona has his copy of the National Maritime Museum’s early Battle of Lepanto, 1571 (BHC0261) and that at Lisbon one of Portuguese Carracks (c.1540, BHC0705). A head-and-shoulders oil portrait of Admiral Duncan (after a Raeburn full-length, BHC2671) is in the historic Trafalgar Tavern at Greenwich, where the Mundays had lived to 1965, before it was reconverted from flats back into a pub.
After moves to two Blackheath flats, they restored and lived in an eighteenth-century house in Rochester, where he served a term as Chairman of the Rochester Society. A smaller Greenwich house, 2 Feathers Place, that they also restored from decayed shop use as home in his final years at the museum, is bisected by the Greenwich Meridian (Longitude 0°) just outside its east gate. Their last move was to Alresford, Hampshire, but for some time after both their sons emigrated to the USA they also had a small sea-view condominium in Bremerton, near Seattle, Washington, for long family visits. John died in nursing care, aged 88, after several weeks in hospital, on 20th April 2012. His wife, Brenda – also a variously talented artist and designer – followed on 15th April 2023, aged 94.
He had no known connection with the Staffordshire landscape painter also called John Munday, active from the 1880s to about 1903.
From Pieter van der Merwe; from personal knowledge and previous obituaries in the Independent 29th June 2012 and Mariner’s Mirror, vol. 98, no. 4 (2012).
Text source: Art Detective
