Cedric Morris valuation
Painter of irises, birds and blunt, truthful portraits, and the teacher who ran Benton End.
Cedric Morris was born at Sketty, near Swansea, in 1889, the son of an industrialist.
What a work by Cedric Morris is worth
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Bio
Cedric Morris was born at Sketty, near Swansea, in 1889, the son of an industrialist. After failing the army entrance examination he worked in Canada and New York, studied singing at the Royal College of Music, and then turned to painting, studying in Paris from 1914. In 1918 he met the painter Arthur Lett-Haines, his partner for life, and they lived in Newlyn and Paris before settling in England in 1926. In 1937 they founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Dedham, which moved in 1940 to Benton End, their house near Hadleigh in Suffolk, where pupils included Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling. Morris was also a plantsman who bred irises, raising about a thousand new seedlings a year. He succeeded to his father's baronetcy in 1947 and died in 1982.
His flower paintings, landscapes and bird pictures appear more often than the portraits, and works with a Benton End provenance, through pupils and friends, are common. Tate held a retrospective in 1984, and the exhibition Cedric Morris: Beyond the Garden Wall in London in 2018 brought his flower paintings back into view.
Newlyn, Paris and Benton End
Lucian Freud, then his pupil, painted Morris's portrait in 1940, the year Morris painted Freud; Freud's portrait of him is in the National Museum of Wales.
Many of the irises he bred at Benton End carry the house's name, and some are still grown.
Pound Farm, the Seven and Five and the irises
Before Dedham, Morris and Lett-Haines lived from 1929 at Pound Farm in Higham, Suffolk, where visitors included Frances Hodgkins and Barbara Hepworth. In the late 1920s he designed textiles for Cresta Silks and posters for Shell and BP, he joined the Seven and Five Society on the proposal of Winifred and Ben Nicholson, and in 1935 he painted two large flower murals for the liner Queen Mary.
He named at least ninety irises, forty-five of them registered with the American Iris Society and many carrying the prefix Benton. Failing eyesight stopped him painting from about 1975. Since 2022 fifteen of his works, mostly portraits and some given by Maggi Hambling, have been on permanent show at Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, and Philip Mould showed his flower paintings again in London in 2025.
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