Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines ran The East Anglian School of Art and Design from their home, Benton End, Hadleigh. The school focused on landscape, life and still life, birds, animals, flowers, and design tending to the absolute. All are also found in this exhibition, as they are all featured in the work of Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. They offered their students the opportunity to spend time in a community of working artists, where, by living and working among them, they would have the opportunity to increase their appreciation and understanding of these subjects.
Beginning in 1919 when Morris and Lett arrived in post-war Paris, the centre of artistic innovation and experimentation, the exhibition shows how they absorbed European Modernist influences and mixed with leading French avant-garde artists before returning to England where they started the school in 1937, firstly at The Pound, Higham and then at Benton End. There, they paved the way for future generations of artists despite lacking formal training and rejecting the art establishment. Among those linked to Benton End are David Carr, Richard Chopping, Lucien Freud, Maggi Hambling, Lucy Harwood, Frances Hodgkins, Glyn Morgan, John Nash, Rosemary Rutherford, and Denis Wirth-Miller, some of whom feature among the portraits included in the show.
Morris, who preferred being known as an artist-plantsman, was not only one of the most accomplished painters of the natural world in twentieth-century British art but also a horticulturist – an iris-breeder, in particular – who influenced Vita Sackville-West and Beth Chatto. He is most widely celebrated for his paintings of flowers, which are often likened to portraits because he captures an accurate likeness and the character of each bloom. Lett had a less prolific artistic output, as he promoted Morris’ career and managed the school. However, he played an important role in developing a strand of surrealist art in England at a time when it was not considered popular.
This exhibition charts the artistic careers of both through more than 90 works, including oils, watercolours, photography, pastels, and ‘little sculptures’ made of found materials. As well as telling the story of these trailblazing artists, it illustrates the breadth of their interests, from abstract art to portraits, landscapes, and the flower painting for which Morris became celebrated.
The show looks at a large selection of artworks: landscapes which show Morris and Lett’s constant travelling in the 1920s and 1930s; portraits which give a flavour of their sprawling social network; protest paintings in which the destruction of wildlife is vividly explored; the meticulously observed and colourful flower paintings of Morris; and the swirling, illusionistic, compositions of Lett in which we are drawn into a world of memories, organic forms and displacement.
At the entrance to the show are images of both men by Morris. Morris’s self-portrait is one of his best portraits, with a thoughtful, reflective gaze set against the English landscape he loved. Lett, by contrast, is given a full-frontal view with a piercing gaze set against a map of Morocco, an indication of their love for foreign travel. Their first overseas trip, to Paris, provides the next focus within the exhibition and highlights their experimentation with the different styles and movements they encountered there.
It was Lett who found his focus soonest, with ‘The Escape’ being a marvellous early work of surrealism in which the emotions of escape – echoing their own personal experiences at this time – are conveyed in the varied movements – dancing, kneeling, stretching – of the blue and black figures set in a dreamlike world.
Morris found his focus in flower paintings, of which many vibrant examples are included. However, his work is most interesting and imaginative when something more is at play in his images than simply observing flowers. ‘Iris Seedlings’ is one example, being a painting of a jug of irises set against a landscape in a way that recalls the flower paintings of Winfred Nicholson and David Jones that interweave background and foreground. Here, however, the background is a framed painting of Benton End, which suggests the confinement and claustrophobia Morris experienced during wartime. ‘Flowers in a Portuguese Landscape’ pulls off a similar trick but without the angst, as here the background is the beautiful setting of the Church of our Lady of the Mount in Funchal, Madeira. In this image, the background’s beauty complements the flowers’ beauty in the foreground. Morris’ protest paintings provide further examples of angst, being natural scenes that connect to the destruction of the natural world experienced through war or the increasing use of pesticides.
Lett’s images of flowers, landscapes, or window views become particularly dense and full of vibrant colours and hidden images. His figures and foliage increasingly interlock and intertwine to indicate the interconnectedness of life and nature. ‘Jeune filles aux fleurs’ is a glorious array of summer flowers, with birds and snakes camouflaged by abundant flora and fauna. ‘Jungle Figures’ creates a similar effect in an image where female nudes are found within an abundant forest.
The focus on flowers, and irises in particular, is then further extended by ‘The Iris Florilegium of Sir Cedric Morris’, a complementary exhibition in Gainsborough’s House itself, which has 27 botanical watercolours of existing cultivated varieties of bearded iris painted by Gold Medal winners of the Botanical Art Show, Royal Horticultural Society. Also complementary to the exhibition are images of ‘Lett Laughing’ and ‘Ghost of Cedric’ by Maggi Hambling.
‘Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines’ extends our appreciation of Morris and Lett considerably by foregrounding Lett’s work alongside that of the better-known Morris and by the range of Morris’ work shown. In doing so, our understanding of what drew so many artists to Benton End to be part of the East Anglian School of Art and Design is also enhanced.
Suffolk, more generally, provides additional opportunities to sample the work of artists linked to Benton End. I took the opportunity to visit several churches containing work by Rosemary Rutherford. Rutherford attended the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, where she focused on flower paintings and landscapes. Although an excellent painter of religious scenes in addition to landscapes and flowers, she is best known for her stained-glass windows, striking examples of which can be found within reach of Sudbury at St Mary Boxford, St Mary the Virgin Walsham-le-Willows, and St Mary Hinderclay. The Memorial Window at Walsham-le-Williams has St Catherine surrounded by a vibrant array of flora and fauna, as Lett-Haines also sought to do in his work. In the same church is a marvellous depiction of Christ walking on the water among several impressionistically rendered Thames barges. As with some of Morris’s images, the lifting of darkness in this image could be a response to changes in their wartime experiences.
During the war, Rutherford created a fresco of ‘Christ Stilling the Storm’, an image intended to give hope during the frightening turmoil of wartime. That fresco is at St Mary with St Leonard in Broomfield, Essex, which was Rutherford’s home at the time, and also has four of her windows. A permanent exhibition on the life and work of Rutherford can now be found there, including mention of her time at Benton End. In reviewing Firstsite’s 2022 survey of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, ‘Life with Art: Benton End and the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing’, Susan Gray identified Rutherford as “one of Benton End’s rediscovered stars”. The Broomfield exhibition and associated programme of talks, to which I will contribute in November, provide a helpful introduction to this fascinating Benton End artist.
‘Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines’ and ‘The Iris Florilegium of Sir Cedric Morris’, 6 July – 3 November 2024, Gainsborough’s House
Visit Here
Rosemary Rutherford exhibition, St Mary with St Leonard, Broomfield
Visit Here