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After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
After last year’s extensive exhibition at Gainsborough’s House, Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, is there a place for the Granary Gallery’s more compact Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman and Traveller? Absolutely.
The gallery’s location on the borders between England and Scotland, surrounded by rugged countryside and the North Sea, underlines Morris’s connection to nature. The intimacy of the galley space gives the works a proximity that is simply not possible in a larger setting.
Born in 1889 to a wealthy Swansea family, following boarding schools, Morris failed to get into Sandhurst military academy. Instead, he was sent to relatives in Canada, where he worked as a farmhand, before travelling to New York and working as a waiter. Travels in France and enrolling in the Académie Délécluse in Montparnasse developed Morris’ interest in Impressionism. After signing up for the Artist Rifles, ill health prevented Morris from seeing active service in World War One, and he spent two years training horses for the front line. On Armistice Day 1918, Morris famously met the then-married Arthur Lett-Haines, and the two formed a partnership lasting over 60 years. They went on to found the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, in 1937, with illustrious students including Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud.
James Lowther’s curation highlights both the British and domestic context of Morris’ career and his and Lett-Haines’ (always known as Lett) integration in the wider European modern art movement.
Paris’ most louche bars and cafes must have been standing room only in the 1920s as British artists thronged the French capital, a scene documented in the Tate’s current Edward Burra show and in the early work of Morris and Lett. Although lacking formal art school training, Café de la Rotonde (1921) shows Morris’ confidence in subverting rules of composition, with the diagonal awning mechanism dominating the foreground, ending in the oversized hat of a diner, who stares beneath the brim, head-on with the viewer. Fernand Leger’s influence is detectable when fracturing the plane with architectural elements. Lett's haunting The Dark Horse (1934) strongly echoes the Futurists and Giorgio de Chirico’s uncanny townscapes. In Powers in Atrophe (1922) with its faceless eyes, outline figure melting into a mass of monumental wall, and central tiny human overwhelmed by their surroundings, Lett shows the surrealist style which dominated his intermittent painting career.
From a distance, Morris’ still lifes and landscapes exude the sheen of oil paint, but close up, the impasto brushstrokes and heavily worked paint become a structural element of what is represented. In A Village in Turkey (1972), stippled diagonals of red paint become roof tiles in a tactile, tangible way. One of Morris’ most well-known works, The Eggs (1944), chosen as the cover for cookery writer Elizabeth David’s ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’, illustrates the dual nature of Morris’ paint treatment. The eggshells’ brown and blue hues shine, dissolve into flecks and swirls, the nearer the viewer comes to the canvas. Eggs are a recurrent motif in Morris’s work, and the off-centre ceramic dish emphasises their fragility, the skewed aerial perspective and series of background doors and doorframes, seemingly offering no way out.
Morris’ works are charged with atmosphere. His revulsion at the mass shooting of game birds is expressed in 1st October 1929 (1929), where the dead birds’ delicate plumage is rendered in almost sculptural detail through heavily worked brown and black paint. The bird’s inverted shape, with its curved neck on the ground and beak pointing upwards, emphasises how it has been snatched mid-flight, its world turned upside down instantly. The graceful curve of the neck is echoed in the arc of tail and wing feathers. A more telling contrast between the creature’s beauty and the ugliness of the act of killing it for sport is hard to imagine. A self-portrait painted a year later shows Morris’ mastery of harmonising the formal elements of anatomy within a setting. In Cedric Morris (c1930), the sinuous curve of the painter’s neck, in three-quarters profile, is repeated in the loop of the hedgerow detail in the background landscape framing his head.
Morris' legacy as a plantsman lives on in countless gardens, where the irises he propagated live on today. Named after the final location of his and Lett’s art school, Benton End, the irises also honoured its animal residents, including Benton Rubio, after their parrot, and Benton Menace after the cat. Iris Seedlings (1943) uses a golden, Grecian-style jug to draw the eye to the yellow blooms forming the edge of the display, while paler flowers fill the centre, with three clusters of crimson petals forming starbursts at the boundary of the plane. Morris fused art and nature to show each of them at their best.
Morris’ work was shown by international art collector Peggy Guggenheim at her pioneering Jeune Gallery in the late 1930s, and he exhibited with leading British abstractionist Ben Nicholson with the Seven and Five Society. He also established lifelong friendships with the students at Benton End, finding paid work for those who could not afford the fees, and fed the art school with produce from Benton End’s garden. Readings of Morris’ art do not have to be exclusively domestic and biographical, or centred on the painter’s place in European modernism. The Granary exhibition shows many routes to explore in appreciating Morris, with more still to come.
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