RÉSIDENCE # 06/03 (ENG)

Landscape, by Cedric Morris
Gainsborough’s House
Sudbury, UK
gainsborough.org

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Cedric Morris (1889-1982), Landscape, possibly Spain, 1961.
Oil on canvas, 81×66 cm.
Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury. 2017.037 © Gainsborough’s House.

Text : Mahaut de La Motte-Broöns, Assistant Curator, Gainsborough’s House.

Cedric Morris (1889-1982) and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines (1894-1978) formed a unique relationship, from their first meeting on Armistice Night in November 1918 until Lett’s death. Creating art, teaching art, founding and managing a school of art, gardening, cooking, travelling, they were hugely influential to generations of artists during the time they lived in Suffolk, primarily at Benton End, Hadleigh. This was their home and the headquarters of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing which they founded in 1937. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s Morris travelled extensively across Europe and North Africa, especially the Canary Islands, sometimes with Lett or with fellow plantsman Nigel Scott. They travelled by ship, hiring cars when they arrived and sought scenic locations for Morris to paint with carefully planned itineraries. They avoided tourist hot spots seeking out the natural landscape. Morris, by the mid-1960s, was travelling to far flung destinations like St Helena 1964, Libya 1968, Tunisia 1970, Turkey 1971. Throughout Morris’s later life, the artist frequently travelled to Spain, where this landscape may have been painted. In the distance, rocky and arid mountains loom over a landscape composed of olive and almond trees interspersed with cacti in the fore-middle ground. The sun-drenched scene is one out of several landscapes in which Morris explored nature completely untouched by industry or civilisation. As typical in so many of Morris’s paintings, the artist’s use of a vigorously applied thick impasto and a rich palette add to the intense impact that this landscape had on Morris.