Cedric Morris’ garden paintings bloom in London exhibition Ian Visits | 22nd May 2025
May 22, 2025
"A famous artist’s garden that inspired many when its owner was alive has come to London, in the form of paintings by Cedric Morris.
The house, Benton End, is a roughly 500-year-old manor that was bought by Sir Cedric Lockwood Morris in 1939 as a working home to teach artists while his partner, Arthur Lett-Haines, looked after the running of the school.
The garden became famous for its planting style, which was heavily influenced by Mediterranean gardens, and for its role as a hub for artists to hang out and share ideas.
The garden fell into disrepair after his death, but is now being restored – and ahead of its reopening, an exhibition of Morris’s paintings has opened in London.
The paintings are mostly of the garden he cultivated. They are notable not just for their artistic quality but also for having proven to be useful archive records of what the garden looked like, helping in its restoration.
The main collection is of the paintings of the flowers and bedding he cultivated, but also some indoor scenes from the 500-year-old house. Do notice the ratatouille, painted in 1954, shortly after Elizabeth David introduced it to the UK as a fashionably new recipe. There are a number of still lifes here, interspersed among the outdoor garden paintings.
The paintings aren’t just pretty flowers; he also painted dead birds, an artist’s protest against the damage industrial farming was doing to wildlife.
Overall, the exhibition highlights the deep connection between Cedric Morris’ art and horticulture and provides new insights into how gardening and plant husbandry influenced his artistic creativity, and how, in turn, his paintings are still shaping the garden’s future."
