EXHIBITIONS centred on artistic couples have traditionally portrayed a male artist with a female muse. “Revealing Nature”, at Gainsborough’s House, looks at the same-sex relationship between Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, who supported each other artistically and emotionally for 60 years.
Meeting at an Armistice Night party in 1918, the couple moved to Paris to paint and travel in Europe and North Africa. In 1937, Morris and Lett-Haines set up the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucian Freud. Morris’s Hadleigh Church (1942) remains an evergreen greetings-card image, and, in 1973, the couple’s Benton End home and art school donated a painting for the restoration fund of Holy Trinity, Long Melford.
Two paintings from 1922, Morris’s An Italian Landscape and Lett-Haines’s Italian Landscape, probably painted in Assisi, show the artists’ early divergent styles. Morris’s impasto brushstrokes for landscape, contrasting with exaggerated, angular planes of buildings with simplified blocks of colour for windows and doors, in a predominantly green and pink palette, owes much to Post-Impressionism. There are few shadows, the thickness of the paint suggesting structural elements such as roof tiles, window frames, and side walls.
Arthur Lett-Haines, Jeunes Filles aux Fleurs (1935), watercolour and gouacheLett-Haines’s treatment of the Umbrian landscape is more influenced by Giorgio de Chirico and surrealism, with a brighter and less naturalistic palette, a landscape revealed in contours rather than foliage, and a galloping dark horse at the centre, prefiguring his painting of 1934 by the same name.
Morris’s unflinching portraits, with their simplification of form, vivid colours, and exaggeration of features, were described by Peggy Guggenheim, who exhibited Morris at her London gallery, as “in the most part nearly caricatures”. His 1940 portrait of Freud shows the 19-year-old artist in a brick-red work shirt, his sculptural face lit from the sitter’s right, the left jaw in deep shadow, with bright blue eyes and rose-pink mouth, breaking up the ochre, ivory, and brown of the flesh and hair. Later, Freud wrote of his teacher: “Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.”
Gainsborough’s House describes Morris’s paintings from the 1930s as “protest paintings”. The artist had great feeling for the natural world, demonstrated in his famous flower paintings and iris propagation. Crisis (1938) resembles a Dutch still-life, with its foregrounded ten brightly coloured birds arranged on branches of a plant sprouting rosehips. A goldcrest sits at the top, with a green woodpecker at the base, surrounded by pink Jersey lilies. The work was a response to European politics preceding the Second World War, and the date was inscribed while the painting was still wet.
The Entry of Moral Turpitude into New York Harbour (1926) is a unique composition for Morris. Echoing the design of an Italian predella, the main panel shows an open boat full of figures in evening dress, in front of the Statue of Liberty, being met on the jetty by a group of stylised puritan figures in black hats. The work was a commentary on Countess Cathcart, recently divorced for adultery, being refused entry to New York on the grounds of moral turpitude. Morris saw the blunt imposition of morality as hypocritical. The surrounding small panels show nightmarish scenes of violence against witches and native people, featuring churches or clerics.
Cedric Morris (left) with a macaw and Arthur Lett-Haines
Morris’s celebrated The Eggs (1944) was bought by Elizabeth David in 1953, and used to illustrate cookery books. There is a sense of foreboding in the whole scene, with the tilted perspective and framing yellow door, opening on to a closed blue door.
From the 1930s, Lett-Haines prioritised promoting his partner’s career and running the art school over his own painting, and his work is less well known. Educated at St Paul’s, he drew on biblical themes, which can be discerned in Jeune Filles aux Fleurs (1935), in which a blue snake is hidden in foreground foliage, coiled and ready to disrupt this garden of Eden
A skulking serpent also appears in The Escape (1931), with its glowing red sky and apocalyptic references. Jungle Figures (1972) presents two feminised Edenic figures, one lying and one squatting, in a kaleidoscope of fantasy blue and orange blooms and giant lush leaves, the sense of perfect paradise heightened through the artist’s love of pattern-making.
“Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines” runs at Gainsborough’s House, 46 Gainsborough Street, Sudbury, Suffolk, until 3 November. Phone 01787 372958. gainsborough.org