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Modern British & Irish Art

Cedric Morris and Beth Chatto: A Friendship in Flowers

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This November, Sotheby’s is delighted to be offering a selection of works from the Estate of Beth Chatto (1923– 2018) OBE VMH in the Modern & Post-War British Art sales, 19 & 20 November. Beth Chatto, one of Britain’s most famed gardeners of the 20th century, was also a close friend of Cedric Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines, and a frequent visitor to their home, Benton End in Suffolk, and Cedric’s iris-filled garden, a “paradise of pollen and paint”.

As part of the Sunday at Sotheby’s programmes of talks to celebrate the sale on Sunday 17th November at 3pm, Lady Wakefield will be in conversation, talking about her time at Benton End and friendship with Cedric and Lett. Please email modbrit@sothebys.com to reserve your free place.

Past Auction
Modern & Post-War British Art
19 November 2019 | 6:00 PM GMT | London

Cedric Morris and Beth Chatto: A Friendship in Flowers

  • Arthur Lett-Haines, Cedric By Lett, 1920
    Estimate £3,000–5,000
    Seen here in a sketch by his long-term partner Lett-Haines, Cedric Morris combined his two passions at Benton End – gardens and painting. Beth later recalled of their first meeting: "I remember my first impression so clearly. Cedric dressed in crumpled corduroys with a small silk scarf above his shirt was smoking a pipe, which he held with his beautiful slender hands. After tea, he showed us all round the garden. [It was…] a bewildering, mind-stretching, eye-widening canvas of colour, textures and shapes, created primarily with bulbous and herbaceous plants. Later I came to realise it was possibly the finest collection of such plants in the country, but that first afternoon there were far too many unknown plants for me to see them, let alone recognise them."
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  • Sir Cedric Morris, Still Life (Scabious, Carnations And Hemerocallis), 1949
    Estimate £25,000–35,000
    This first encounter would lead to a longstanding friendship, based on a mutual devotion to gardens and creativity, and over the course of this friendship, Beth and Andrew Chatto would amass the present collection of paintings by Cedric and Lett, a testament to their shared passions. "‘[It is] impossible to say what he [Cedric Morris] has meant to me. [He] influenced me in so many ways, made my life. And many many others. A great man, and a very modest man, in his own way." As Beth recognised, Cedric approached his garden as a canvas and his canvases as re-presentations of his plants, a symbiosis of creativity. The present work is one of Cedric’s most beautiful still-life paintings, an explosion of scabious, carnations and hemerocallis.
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  • Cedric Morris, Landscape (Hadleigh), circa 1940s
    Estimate £12,000–18,000
    Landscape (Hadleigh) was most likely painted during the war – Benton End, Cedric and Lett’s home, was on the outskirts of Hadleigh in Suffolk. Tired of London, Cedric acquired the house in 1939 and, with Lett, set up the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. Lucien Freud would be their most famous pupil, supposedly almost burning down the school from a discarded cigarette. It was through her plant expertise that Beth Chatto met Cedric and, along with her husband Andrew Chatto, a plant environmentalist and farmer, became part of the set that congregated around Cedric Morris' and Arthur Lett-Haines’ home, Benton End, in Suffolk. This artistic, bohemian group existed outside the mainstream of London and yet fundamentally changed the course of the still-life genre and horticulture respectively – Cedric cultivated over 90 new irises.
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  • Cedric Morris, Still Life (Clematis, Kniphofia and Hollyhock), 1944
    Estimate £25,000–35,000
    This flower still life of clematis, kniphofia and hollyhock is shown in one of Cedric’s preferred, wonderfully surrealist guises. The flowers in the immediate foreground are set before an open doorway, with a lush British landscape visible through the threshold. In the painting, Cedric combines interior and exterior, cultivated plants and the wilder, untamed natural environment, and an element of realism in the careful depiction of each flower with an idiosyncratic vision that is partly expressionist and partly surrealist. In his hands, botanical painting takes on a new, modernist understanding.
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  • Sir Cedric Morris, Rooftops, Tavira, Portugal, 1959
    Estimate £15,000–25,000
    Throughout his life, Cedric travelled constantly and extensively, across Europe, Turkey, North and Central Americas, and North Africa. Cedric painted these scenes, delighting in the differences in light and environment, so far removed from daily life in Suffolk. Rooftops, Tavira, Portugal is one such work, an expansive view across a cityscape that is laid out in bright blues and yellows. This work was included in Cedric’s Tate posthumous retrospective in 1984.
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  • Arthur Lett-Haines, Floral Design, 1941
    Estimate £800–1,200
    Beth and Andrew Chatto put this collection together from the mid-1970s. In the 1970s, Beth Chatto won 10 successive gold medals at the Chelsea Flower show, and published the first of her numerous books, The Dry Garden, 1978. Chatto was the leading proponent of ‘right plant right place’ and founded the Beth Chatto Gardens outside Colchester. She was awarded the Victoria medal of hour by the Royal Horticultural Society in 1987 and made an OBE in 2002.
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