Sir Cedric Morris 1889-1982

Although rarely now included in survey exhibitions of mid 20th Century British Art, Cedric Morris is one of the most remarkable figures of that period, and at Benton End, the sixteenth century house just outside Hadleigh in Suffolk which he shared with his life-long partner, Arthur Lett-Haines, he created one of the most remarkable art schools of the period, a place ‘outside the system’.

A cosmopolitan pairing in the years after WWI, Morris and Lett-Haines travelled widely in Europe, and he held a string of highly successful exhibitions: ‘Cedric is on the wings of an incomparable success – selling & selling – over 40 pictures now gone…’ (Frances Hodgkins, letter to Dorothy Selby, May 1928, reporting Morris’ successful show at Arthur Tooth & Sons). However, he became increasingly disenchanted with the art world and the gallery system, and by the 1930s he was withdrawing from it more and more. Having moved to Suffolk in 1929, Morris and Lett-Haines opened the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in 1937. Their progressive approach to art education, which we might now call holistic, was a world away from the formal systems in place in the established teaching system and was hugely successful, and the range of ages, abilities and backgrounds of their students was seen as a positive part of the whole process. Perhaps the most famous of their alumni is Lucian Freud, who enrolled as a sixteen year old and has always maintained that his formative experiences at the EASPD was of vital importance to his development as an artist. In 1939, a fire (according to the family of David Carr, a fellow student with Freud, caused by a carelessly disposed cigarette after a late night carousing by Carr and Freud) forced the EASPD to find a new home and by the end of the year they had resettled at Benton End. At Benton End, not only did the school flourish, but also the life. With many of the students living in, the sense of community was a new and vital experience to many of them. As Ronald Blythe, a former student, wrote, ‘there was a whiff of wine and garlic in the air. The atmosphere was well out of this world so far as I had previously witnessed and tasted it. It was robust and coarse, and exquisite and tentative all at once…also faintly dangerous.’ Although life revolved around painting, the days at the school were anchored by the lunches and dinners at which Lett’s legendary culinary talents provided a forum for discussion, conversation and growth. When one remembers that the pioneering cookery writer, Elizabeth David, was not only a friend, but also a collector of Morris’ works (she was the original owner of The Eggs, now in the Tate Collection), it is easy to see how the presence of such extravagances as garlic, peppers and olives in the austere, rationed and Mrs Beeton-conditioned world of the post-WWII years could have provided such a enlightening experience.

The present painting is highly remarkable in its combining virtually the whole world of Morris and Benton End into one work. The house forms a solid background to a luscious display of flowers, both native and exotic, through which flies a butterfly and a bird in hot pursuit. Morris was a keen and innovative horticulturalist and the garden at Benton End was famous in such circles, particularly for its displays of irises, for which Morris was awarded a host of prizes. So well-known was the garden that horticultural visitors threatened to disrupt Morris’ to an extent seen in the colourful remark remembered by former student Joan Warburton where he complained of ‘all these f*****s that come to see the bloody garden’. Morris was also a devoted naturalist, and throughout his career produced many studies of birds and animals which are uncannily ‘like’ yet without the Audubon-style naturalism usually attached to the genre. Never sentimental in his view of nature, Morris nevertheless felt the intrusion of the modern world keenly, perhaps most memorably in Landscape of Shame (Tate Collection), painted in response to the effects on rural bird life of the spraying of chemical pesticides.

Black Irises also provides an object lesson in Morris’ highly individual painting technique. He used no under-drawing at all, starting in the top left corner of each canvas and gradually unrolling the design which was clearly already complete in his mind. The characteristic thick paint, handled in short dense strokes, has few parallels in the work of his contemporaries and emphasises the modernism inherent in his approach, never disguising the way in which the picture is made, yet still allowing the strength of the image to shine forth.