The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
The power dynamic between couples’ influence on modern art has become an increasingly popular subject for shows over the last five years: in 2019, Modern Couples at the Barbican explored the creative relationship between 50 couples including Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and Dora Maar and Picasso. But the status of the couples could be quite uneven, with Maar cast in the model and muse role to the more famous Picasso. Similarly Lee Miller can be read as more submissive subject of some Man Ray’s photography, than equal collaborator. Then there is the issue of women taking time away from their art to raise families, a common occurrence highlighted by the recent late-career renaissance of textile designer Pauline Caulfield, first wife of painter Patrick Caulfield. The summer show at Rottingdean’s Grange Gallery, Prydie, revealing the overlooked career of Mabel Pryde Nicholson, Ben Nicholson’s mother and wife of portraitist and still life painter William Nicholson, examines the same phenomenon from an early twentieth-century perspective.
For same-sex couples, one partner’s career having a more public trajectory over the other can influence critical reputations for decades. Recently Charleston explored how Patricia Preece assumed the authorship of her partner Dorothy Hepworth’s portraits and paintings, with Hepworth’s collaboration. In Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines, Gainsborough’s House brings out of the shadows the lesser known of the artistic duo who founded the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, whose students included Maggi Hambling and Lucien Freud. Morris’ 1940 portrait of Lucien Freud shows its 19-year-old subject in a red workshirt and black polo neck, his curly hair closely modelled in impasto browns, with flecks of bright green along the hairline and on the crown. His face is rendered in yellow-green, with contours suggested by deeply shaded shadow rather than line. Freud later wrote that ‘Cedric taught me to paint and more important to keep at it. He did not say much but let me watch him at work.’
Two years after his death, Morris was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1984, making Gainsborough House the first significant show of Morris in 40 years, and the first exhibition ever to present his work with that of his partner of 60 years, Arthur Lett-Haines.
Lett-Haines was married when he met Morris on Armistice Night in 1918. The two moved to Cornwall, then France where they faced less legislative discrimination, and studied art in Paris meeting collector Peggy Guggenheim, and artists Juan Gris and Man Ray. Returning to London at the end of the 1920s, Morris’ unease at the London art scene prompted a move to Suffolk. They opened their art school in 1937, first in Dedham, and then three years later after a fire - caused, according to legend, by Freud’s unextinguished cigarette butt - in Benton End. Given Morris and Lett-Haines had no formal art training, their achievement in founding and running an art school which had a profound influence on postwar British art is immense.
Revealing Nature opens with Morris and Lett-Haines’ paintings from their 1920s studies in France and Europe. In this period Lett-Haines boldly embraced developments in Italian Futurism and British Vorticism, as well as experimenting with surrealism, which was to shape his work for the rest of his life. By contrast Morris’ work is less certain. Placed side by side, Morris’ An Italian Landscape (1922) and Lett Haines’ Italian Landscape (c.1922), both oil on canvas, and likely painted in Assisi, illustrate the two artists’ styles. Morris’ Umbrian hillside scene employs the distorted perspective and foreshortening of the facades of near objects, which we also see in his celebrated The Eggs (1944), used as the cover for Elizabeth David’s storied postwar cookbook. The thick application of paint and muted palette echoes the Freud portrait. By contrast Lett-Haines takes a much more formalist approach to the landscape, expressing the two houses as an intersecting series of cubes and planes. Terrain is far more delineated between rock and greenery. A note of surrealism is introduced with the dark horse in the foreground, shaded in purple and mauve, prefiguring Lett-Haines’ painting of the same name of 1934. An earlier work, Old Brighton Railway Station (1920), shows the influence of Giorgio de Chirico and Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, with its geometry and lines radiating outwards, and a huge, four-faced, clock dominating the left foreground.
The return to England marked a reduction in Lett-Haines’ artistic output, as he focused on dealing with galleries and dealers for his partner’s exhibitions, and then devoted himself to running their art school. But by the mid-1960s he was reinspired to paint, drawing on the influence of Kandinsky and Picasso, as well as the Vorticists and Futurists. In the upstairs gallery of Gainsborough’s House, Lett-Haines’ later work takes centre stage; Vue d’une fenetre (1967), creates an imaginary world of foliage and creatures, replacing the carefully tended beds at Benton End, created by his plantsman partner. Jungle Figures (1972) is a lush retelling of the Creation story with a feminised Adam and Eve. And Witch Fetish (Portrait of Maggi Hambling) (1962) is a resonant example of Lett-Haines’ ‘humbles’: small sculptures made from found materials, expressing an emotional truth.
Recognition that artists have never practised from a level playing field, as well as more shows granting overlooked partners their moment in the sun, can only be a positive development within the art world.
Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines is showing at Gainsborough's House until 3rd November.
Make sure to check in on the gowithYamo app with your visit!
