Explore: Sir Cedric Morris

(1889 - 1981)

Cedric Morris was born in Swansea and began painting just before the First World War, largely self-taught. He briefly attended the Académie Delacluse in Paris in 1914. With his life-long companion, the painter Arthur Lett Haines (1894-1978), he established the East Anglian School of Drawing and Painting in Dedham, Suffolk, whose students included Lucian Freud. Morris exhibited with the Seven and Five Society (1926-1932), but later withdrawing as his preference for figuration diverged from their focus on abstraction. During the Depression, Morris worked with communities in his native south Wales to establish art societies. He inherited his father’s baronetcy in 1947. A major retrospective of his work was held at the Tate, London in 1984. In 2018, the exhibition, 'Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman' that explored his flower paintings, was held at the Garden Museum, Lambeth.