The Garden Museum took me back to the 1950s in this captivating show The Times | By Laura Freeman
May 31, 2026
"Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint at the Garden Museum in London has recreated a fantasy of Benton End. Here you will meet six characters in search of supper. They never coincided but each was denizen of or a visitor to Benton End. Cedric Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines are the exhibition’s leading men: Cedric (he always went by his first name) painted and gardened; Lett ran the art school. They taught, in a loose and liberal fashion, 50 or 60 students over several decades of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. Ernst Freud dropped off his son Lucian with the words: “Take my son, he’s a wild animal.” The fire that burnt down a previous incarnation of the school was thought to have been started by one of Freud’s cigarettes ... I left this evocative and convivial show craving ratatouille, resolving to plant irises and level the earth at the back of the garden for a greenhouse of my own."
