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Paysage du Jardin No. 2 was painted at the peak of Morris’s career as a flower painter and is an unparalleled example of his ability to fuse abundance with individuality. The composition includes no fewer than sixteen distinct plant species and serves as a love letter to the remarkable garden he created at The Pound, where Morris lived with his partner Arthur Lett-Haines prior to Benton End. Its power lies in Morris’s unusually direct viewpoint, which he achieved by lying his canvas on the ground and painting next to the flowerbed. The flowers, each acutely observed against a dark background, occupy an almost flattened picture plane, recalling the dense ornamental fields of medieval mille-fleurs tapestry.
By the late 1920s, Morris had established himself as one of the leading British artists of his generation. His 1928 exhibition at Arthur Tooth & Sons was both a critical and commercial triumph, and every work in the exhibition sold, along with...
Paysage du Jardin No. 2 was painted at the peak of Morris’s career as a flower painter and is an unparalleled example of his ability to fuse abundance with individuality. The composition includes no fewer than sixteen distinct plant species and serves as a love letter to the remarkable garden he created at The Pound, where Morris lived with his partner Arthur Lett-Haines prior to Benton End. Its power lies in Morris’s unusually direct viewpoint, which he achieved by lying his canvas on the ground and painting next to the flowerbed. The flowers, each acutely observed against a dark background, occupy an almost flattened picture plane, recalling the dense ornamental fields of medieval mille-fleurs tapestry.
By the late 1920s, Morris had established himself as one of the leading British artists of his generation. His 1928 exhibition at Arthur Tooth & Sons was both a critical and commercial triumph, and every work in the exhibition sold, along with many others from the studio. One critic described it as ‘sensationally successful’, praising Morris as ‘the most interesting of our young English painters’.[1] Further success followed in The Hague, and by 1930 one commentator claimed that Morris had become ‘the rage’.[2]
Yet this growing reputation did not satisfy Morris, and he grew increasingly frustrated by London and by the commercial pressures of the gallery world. He and his partner Lett made the decisive move to the countryside – in 1930 they settled at The Pound, a sixteenth-century farmhouse in Higham, Suffolk, where they created an extraordinary garden. The house became a place of retreat and experiment, frequented by friends including Frances Hodgkins and John Skeaping [fig. 1].
These years following Morris’ departure from London in 1930 are now widely regarded as the pinnacle of his career. Freed from the demands of city life and before his commitments to the art school at Benton End, he devoted himself fully to painting, drawing his subjects directly from the garden he cultivated around him. The flower paintings of this period are his most successful works, combining botanical intimacy with dramatically modern pictorial force. In these years, Morris’s dual identity as painter and plantsman found its fullest expression, producing the works that would come to define his reputation.
[1] T. W. Earp, (1928) ‘Cedric Morris’, The Studio. Vol. 96, July-December 1928, pp.241-8. Quoted in Richard Morphet, (1984) Cedric Morris. London: Tate Gallery, p. 32.
[2] Anon., (1930) ‘Cedric Morris: Painter Who is ‘the rage’’, The Scotsman. 13 May. Quoted in Richard Morphet, (1984) Cedric Morris. London: Tate Gallery, p. 32.
