Page 58 Daily Mail, Friday, August 23, 2019
BIOGRAPHY
ROGER LEWIS
A LESSON IN ART AND LIFE
by Hugh St. Clair
(Pimpernel Press £30, 272 pp)Lifelong fixation: Mottled Iris painted by MorrisPictures: TATE ARCHIVE © CEDRIC MORRIS ESTATE; PHOTO: © TATE/BRIDGEMAN IMAGESfather was an official of the Ama-
teur Wrestling Association, and sent
his son to work on a farm, to
toughen him up.
In 1915, Lett-Haines was
wounded in Mesopotamia. A year
later, aged 22 and living in Chelsea,
he married a girl called Aimee. At
their Armistice Day party in 1918,
he met Cedric Morris.
Lett-Haines and his bride had
planned to emigrate to America, so
‘he told Aimee to go on ahead’ —
and stayed behind with Morris, sold
the Chelsea property to the Sit-
wells, and journeyed to Cornwall,
‘pondering his decision to leave his
wife for a man’. (Aimee, poor thing,
drops out of the story. They were
never actually divorced and she
died in California, in 1964.)
The chaps remained together for
the next 60 years. According to
Hugh St Clair, ‘quibbling andbitching were part of the way their
relationship worked’ — and Morris
and Lett-Haines, wearing berets
and Fair Isle sweaters and desper-
ate to be taken for artists, were
soon renowned as gentlemen
eccentrics, keeping rabbits and
parrots in their temporary abodes.
To make ends meet, Lett-Haines
translated French poetry, Morris
painted café scenes or vases of
flowers, which to him were ‘intenseand determined things, symbols of
strength portraying the eternity of
existence’. (Do remember that,
when next pruning the tea roses.)
Gradually, however, Morris’ art
took off. There were many exhibi-
tions and favourable reviews, and
he discussed painting techniques
with Winston Churchill.L
eTT-HAIneS’ surrealist
watercolours, however,
were less esteemed. Unlike
Morris, he received no
invitations to join societies and he
was never ‘sought out by the press’,
though he did once have a few pic-
tures exhibited at Fortnum’s.
The idea for the east Anglian
School of Painting and Drawing,
situated in a landscape familiar to
John Constable where ‘woodcock
swooped in winter and nightingales
sang on summer evenings’, came
about when Morris decided he
wanted somewhere tranquil to
grow his irises and work on can-
vases depicting abundant gardens.
Lett-Haines was to function as
‘manager, organising secretary and
cook’, where he was assisted in the
kitchen by none other than eliza-
beth David, who used herbs, spices,
olive oil and garlic — unheard-of
ingredients in england at the time.In addition to landscape painting
and life drawing — where the
models were a toothless crone from
the local asylum and a man with the
wonderful name of Dicky Chopping,
‘who agreed to pose nude’ — the
school revolved around lavish meals
with wine. A typical topic over din-
ner would be, ‘Did you know camels
copulate backwards?’
Maggi Hambling, now one of our
most highly regarded painters and
sculptors, was a pupil. To pay her
way she slaved in the kitchen. ‘I had
to scrape maggots from the meat,’
she recalled, wincing at the memory
of the clouds of flies. To reach a
fridge Maggi had to clamber over
buckets of soaking underwear.
Lucian Freud turned up, because
he’d been expelled from everywhere
else — most recently from Darting-
ton ‘for dropping his trousers in the
street’. He sold his exquisite
paintings of brambles for £3.
The school survived until the Six-
ties, though the gardens became
overrun with weeds as Morris’
eyesight failed. The hosepipe ban
in 1976 was a catastrophe.
Lett-Haines died in 1978, Sir
Cedric Morris four years later. Obit-
uaries made no mention of their
relationship. Last year, Benton end
was bought by a charitable founda-
tion, which is pledged to restore the
garden and offer painting classes.T
HOUGH ernest Heming-
way, who met them in
Paris, was irritated by
what he called their ‘supe-
rior, simpering composure’,most people encountering Cedric
Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines,
who ‘dined on wild swan and
drank to excess,’ and who may
best be described as professional
bohemians, were enchanted.
In the Twenties and the Thirties they
were the archetypal ‘jolly young people in
colourful clothes’, organising fancy dress
parties attended by painter Augustus
John and actor John Gielgud, with Royal
Ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton in
charge of the dancing.
Music came from a wind-up gramophone,
except when composer Benjamin Britten
turned up with tenor Peter Pears, who sang
‘The Foggy, Foggy Dew,’ to Britten’s guitar
accompaniment. To drink there were cock-
tails made from surgical spirit — people
didn’t have hangovers so much as comas.
In 1937, Morris and Lett-Haines founded
the east Anglian School of Painting and
Drawing, in the village of Dedham. The
most illustrious pupil was Lucian Freud,
who burnt it down — a discarded cigarette
butt amidst a pile of turpentine rags was
the excuse. Morris and Lett-Haines bore
him no ill will — and they simply started
up again in new premises at Benton end,
near Ipswich.
M
ORRIS (b. 1889) was a South
Welsh baronet with a passion
for propagating (and
painting) purple poppies
and smoky grey irises, plants with which
he had a peculiar relationship. ‘Tempera-
mental sluts!’ he once called them.
He was brought up in family mansions in
the hinterland of South Wales, and he
fossicked for shells on the beaches of the
Gower. Morris’ ‘future interest in plants
came about as a baby when his mother
would give him a flower to stop him
screaming,’ says Hugh St Clair, author of
this genial study.
At Charterhouse school, Morris was ‘sen-
sitive and self-conscious’, and ‘I soon dis-
covered,’ he confessed, ‘that I possessed
the kind of body people liked to touch.’
He enrolled for boxing, but ran away and
hid in the woods. He went as far as new
York, indeed, where he worked as an eleva-
tor-boy. Returning to england, he was a
flop at the Royal College of Music, being
seemingly tone-deaf, and, when war broke
out, he was rejected for military service.
He instead trained horses for the Front:
‘Their death-rate on the battlefield was
high and they needed replacing with
increasing frequency.’
Lett-Haines (b. 1894), meanwhile, had a
modest upbringing in Maida Vale. His
HALF-PRICE BOOK OFFER!
Pick up from
VOUCHER: PAGE 64
SAVE 50% on The Boy Who Followed
His Father Into Auschwitz by Jeremy
Dronfield — only with the Daily Mail
Their art school
was burned down
by Lucian Freud,
they dined on
swan and drank
surgical spirit
cocktails. How
two art world
hedonists lived
the original...
Partners:
Artists
Cedric
Morris (left)
and Arthur
Lett-HainesPartners:
Artists
Cedric
Morris(left)
and Arthur
Lett-HainesBOHEMIAN
RHAPSODY