Gail-Nina Anderson checks out the work of Cedric Morris, which is currently bringing untold joy to the Granary Gallery in Berwick.

It’s an understated little accolade to which few twentieth century painters might aspire, but the inscription on Cedric Morris’s tombstone says it all - “Artist Plantsman 1889 – 1982”. Well, not absolutely all, I suppose – one might add educator, inspirator and chap with whom one would like to have partied and/or classified wild flowers. He was also a dab hand in the field of interbreeding varieties of irises, so kudos for that too.

And currently on show in Berwick is the first exhibition of his work to be held in the north, with a few paintings by his life-time partner Arthur Lett-Haines (“Lett”) and a portrait of Morris by the young Lucien Freud thrown in. Morris’s works didn’t start to enter such mainstream establishments as the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery until just before his death, and several of those included in the show are on loan from Gainsborough’s House in Suffolk, a reminder that the much-travelled artist would find the countryside of that county the most congenial place to put down roots.

And that comes as something of a surprise, as Morris was born into the sort of wealthy Welsh family for whom a rural environment meant hunting, shooting and fishing, the perfect relaxations for a lad whose public schooldays were a prelude to a career in the military followed no doubt by his own serious membership of the local squirarchy.  It didn’t quite turn out like that, as Morris skipped Sandhurst and rattled around abroad until the lingering aura of Impressionism plus the excitements of early Modernism in Paris pulled him towards painting as his vocation. Back in London after WWI he could have been subsumed by the Bohemian embrace of the upper-crust interwar arty-party scene, especially as he now began (at a time when homosexuality was still criminalised in Britain) his relationship with Lett. Both young men, however, found common ground that  eventually drew them away from the city, and they began a supportive partnership that centred on painting and art education (though parties, with more than a dash of the wild and unconventional, did remain a spontaneous expression of their social energy.)

No surprise that Morris crossed career paths with any number of those artists who represent  British Modernism from its plein-air beginnings (the Newlyn style proved too traditional for him, though he got on well with Laura Knight and the Proctors) to the uncompromising abstractionist work of Ben Nicholson (which offered little temptation when set against his passion for depicting plant life and the natural world.) He knew Wyndham Lewis, Barbara Hepworth, Edward Wadsworth, Lucien Freud and Maggi Hambling, the last two being among his students at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing. This project brought together the strengths of Morris and Lett’s relationship and dedication – an art school in Dedham opened in 1937. The couple had moved to Suffolk in 1931 – though they remained avid travellers, the allure of landscape, gardens, plant-finding expeditions and plant growing experiments grounded them in an emotional security where Morris’s painting could settle into its most fruitful development. Country life did have its disadvantages – Morris was deeply at odds with the local farmers’ use of pesticides and killing of wildlife – but against  expectation the couple seems to have been accepted. The art school represented a blow against regimented teaching and also the time consuming complexities of urban art world politics – it was described as “an oasis of decency for artists outside the system”. Lett ran the administration and the kitchen (common meals were part of the community spirit), Morris the teaching and the garden. Tuition was mostly self-directed, encouraging a freedom of expression rather than imposing style or technique. True, the original building did burn down (possibly as a result of the young Lucian Freud, a student at the time, discarding a cigarette in the direction of turpentine soaked rags) but the School moved successfully into Benton End House, “an enclosed world … hidden in an enchanted garden.”

Following Morris’s death the Tate Gallery held an exhibition of his work, since when it has featured in three other shows plus a permanent display within Gainsborough’s House. The Berwick show now marks another point on this rising curve of interest, while in the horticultural world Morris’s legacy of iris varieties still thrives. Indeed, among an artistic output in which a Post-Impressionistic economy of means was memorably applied to such traditional genres as portraiture, landscape and still life, his flower paintings stand out as evocations of the deepest empathy and love for a subject deceptively simple and deeply evocative.

Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman & Traveller, until 12 October, Granary Gallery, Berwick, maltingsberwick.co.uk

Pic: Cedric Morris

Cedric Morris (c1930) © The estate of Sir Cedric Morris

Photo: National Portrait Gallery